Last week I received an RFI (Request for Information) from a Fortune 1000 firm in the tech space. They were obviously contacting lots of SEO firms, but I figured I'd take a chance (mostly to see what the response would be like).
Fast forward to today when I get the following in my email (excerpted):
The <removed> team wants to take this opportunity to thank you for your participation in the RFI. Your Agency's response was thorough and professional.
However, based on a complete review of all the submitted proposals, <removed> has decided to move forward with other agencies regarding the services outlined in the RFI.
The team here at <removed> felt that while your Agency was capable, its experience did not match completely with what they felt was necessary to accomplish the objectives of the program.
I didn't think about it again until this evening while watching the Simpsons (that episode where they think Maggie's a genius until they discover it's just Lisa feeding her information). For some reason, I wondered about the specific issue - experience. The company hadn't asked for a list of clients or references, so we hadn't provided one and thus I was curious about how they came to decide that our experience was lacking. Of course, I found the problem as soon as I read my own (careless) answer to this question:
Describe the Experience of Your SEO Team
My answer is excerpted below:
SEOmoz's team has been working together since 1997 in web development and marketing. Together, we've launched the success of several small companies – helping them to grow quickly into behemoths in their industry (or in some cases, to simply become exceptionally profitable). (missing sentences belong here) We've worked on more than 3 dozen unique sites/projects since 2002, and we continue to keep the number of projects we take on relatively small so as to provide highly individualized attention to each client.
In addition to our experience on projects, our team has been written about in nearly every major industry publication, from SearchEngineWatch to Sitepoint to About.com, C|Net, Wired News and more. We've also been featured in major offline media, including a profile article in Newsweek magazine (in December of 2005) and articles in USA Today, the Washington Post and the Seattle PI.
The funny part is, I left out a few sentences (noted above). It would have been wise of me to mention our half dozen clients (past and present) who are of comparable or larger size to this particular company, but I completely spaced, left it out, and now it looks like SEOmoz only works with small firms. Brilliant!
In any case, I can't fault the company for looking at the proposal and taking a step back - hopefully you'll learn from my lesson and give your own responses a once-over before you shoot them out.
BTW - Anyone with a similar story to share would be much appreciated, as I'm feeling pretty dumb here.
Or it was more likely they already had someone chosen for the job, don't be so hard on yourself Rand...hehe
Based on the blog entry's title, I was thinking more along the lines of "I thought I should ask you to marry me before your butt gets any fatter. Whaddya say?"
Ouch!
The best part is that rebecca's avatar fit perfectly with that kind of comment. :)
Rand,
in the realm of stupid mistakes made when dealing with a new or prospective client. One of my very first clients was a small company making this ridiculously cool little gadget that would have easily caught on-- we were in the perfect place to help them market and brand (off/online) Everything was going great until we made the recommendation that they look into changing the products name. (There were a number of other established products with VERY similiar names) BAM. over, lost the client. "Thank you for your initial research...blahblahblah..." It happens to everyone I suppose. (by the way, the product flopped-- they brought marketing "in house" yet never got an "in house" marketer.)
That wasn't a stupid mistake. Changing the name can be a massive benefit when handled right. The company you worked for was just attached to the wrong thing. Probably someone important in the company picked the name and is "married" to it for all the wrong reasons, so by suggesting they change it, the recommendation was taken as a personal insult. Again, not your fault. When you hire a consultant, you need to be willing to step back and look at everything objectively, and some companies just can't do that.
Penn .... why are you surprised? It's so common. Business owners sit for hours coming up with a name for their business or product. After they're done, the name sounds similar to their competitor name and now they love it. They simply fall in love with it. (#1 mistake is to fall in love with your business).
So the person to tell them that they are wrong ... you guessed right .... gone.
Let this be a lesson to you ... first ask how strongly they "love" the name and if they love it ... LEAVE IT! :-)
On the other hand ... if I had a marketing company with enough revenue that I could easily reject clients, I'd do the same thing you did. Just say it in their face. "You've got a great product but the name won't do justice to it."
It all depends on the situation you're in.
I don't recall saying I was surprised or implying it at all, pianist.
And that is exactly the point I was trying to make: I spent all my time on external research that I didn't bother to spend the time properly examing interal needs, I try never to need to the same lesson twice. =)
Hi Rand,
Don’t worry about it. You’ll probably pick up someone even better in San Jose.
The saddest part, is this company probably went to one of the Big SEO firms who will do nothing but tweak their meta tags and then charge them 100K for nothing.
You have a great beginners guide to SEO. Perhaps you can expand upon the theme and work with several other “A List SEO’s to create a guide to help people select an SEO firm. The more people that contribute, the more unbiased and valuable it will be. This way it can be seen more as impartial guide and less like an SEOmoz sales kit.
I’ve received stacks of slick 30+ page proposals from big SEO companies who work with some of the biggest brands. Unfortunately, none of the proposals included linking or any kind of content creation or management.
The SEO firms that I did work with were on the “A List” but had very amateurish proposals compared to some of the ones I received. But… Since I’ve been doing my homework on this stuff for quite a while, (6 years) I was easily able to tell the real deal from the hype.
Not many in-house marketing folks know how to select an SEO firm. I’ve got the latest Marketing Sherpa guide on the subject and I think it mostly sucks. They have this huge RFP template with a hundred irrelevant questions that is guaranteed to be tossed right into the trash upon reciept.
If you had a better guide than that one, it would probably be good link bait as well as help your future prospects recognize quality and if they don’t work with you after reading it, at least they won’t fall for the Big SEO company do-nothing proposals.
Aloha, Dave.
In my first answer for an RFP I outlined everything in an e-mail (about a page long). The response was like "could you please improve your proposal?". A proposal in a couple of MS Word documents seemed to do the trick.
Is it particularly important to use a strict formal format when answering RFPs? Why don't people just value the simple things like e-mail plain text? Oh well.
In my experience, most RFPs will dictate the format they want the proposal in. If they do not dictate the format (and that's rare), give it to them in the same format it was given to you.
And yes, the format rules do tend to be fairly strict. Word documents, proper formatting ... as they say, the devil is in the details.
Rand... the client list - you might make one that gives the gamut of your experience and then highlight the ones most relevant to the proposal. Or extract from a master list to custom target a proposal.