PushingSnowballs

What are the questions you need to ask yourself before deciding whether or not to respond to an RFP or RFQ? That was what I had originally envisioned for this post. But then I realized that there’s actually just one question that matters.

Want to create a great brochure to send via email? Then don’t just make a PDF of your current printed materials. Make sure your work is seen in its best light by creating a document that is optimized for on-screen viewing, and then using the full range of functionality available in PDFs.

The authors of Professional Services Marketing have created two interesting tools to accompany the book, and made them available for free download on their website.

As a marketer of a small firm, there is a lot you can learn from big-firm marketing operations, and some of them don’t cost anything. Here are six examples.

Here’s another good example of a well-executed creative-services RFP response. This one was a winning proposal for a law school web project, prepared by Chicago-based Rogue Element and offered for free download by HOW Design Magazine.

I know from watching the stats for this site (especially those associated with my recent post on How to Find RFPs), that there are a lot of people out there looking for samples of other firm’s responses to requests for proposals, so I decided to start posting these as I find them.

With architecture and product design, it’s pretty easy to craft a sustainability or “green” strategy that makes sense. But for graphic designers, it’s a little more challenging to create a meaningful sustainability strategy, and then explain that strategy to current and prospective clients.

Some of you may be familiar with The List. They maintain a database of marketing decision makers at companies throughout the U.S. and Canada, and sell access to this database on a subscription basis. It’s actually a pretty good service (although not cheap) if that’s your market, and…

While I’m definitely more open to the possibility of there being value in speculative work than many people I talk to about it, I agree that it’s not right in every instance, and in many cases it’s a horrible idea. When can you tell when it is a bad idea? It’s actually not that hard.

The right assortment of tools are essential to finding the RFP opportunities that are appropriate for your business, and finding enough of them that you will have a reasonable chance of actually winning some. Here are a few of the methods that I have experimented with over the years.