What’s With The ‘Hail Mary’ RFPs?
What's With The 'Hail Mary' RFPs?
I had a PM that made me cringe inwardly every time they came to my cubicle. Because he only visited me when he had an RFP that was a total long shot. You know the situation:
- No prior connection with the client.
- Tangential project experience.
- No teaming discussions or team development.
- Due in two weeks.
He’d show up three or four times a year, obscure RFP in hand, sheepish smile on his face. And we’d do the dance. Sometimes he led. Sometimes I led. Same dance every time.
Like clockwork.
And one day, it hit me. He wasn’t coming to me with a random RFP. He was bringing me a “Hail Mary” right after sales numbers had been announced. He had a metric he was trying to meet, and this was how he was going about it. Because he needed to show effort, he was embarrassed, and he trusted me to help him, even when I knew we would not win.
This wasn’t a PM who didn’t get it. This was a broken workflow:
- Didn’t achieve goal.
- Got reprimanded or publicly called out.
- Made a Herculean proposal effort.
- Lost.
- Felt deflated, so didn’t try again.
- Didn’t achieve goal.
And we were perpetuating the cycle.
To hit his metric, he didn’t need more effort. He needed a different process.
Backed by that insight, I changed the dance. The next time he came with a “Hail Mary” RFP, I was ready for him. I handed him a folder.
“What’s this?”
“Those are all the outstanding on-call contracts we have that cover your discipline,” I replied. “We already have the contracts. But no one is calling the clients to see if we can help them.”
He smiled. There was money sitting on the table and no one was following up. He took the folder and went back to his desk. That quarter, he brought in five separate projects from a couple of phone calls.
Marketers are great at seeing patterns. We can often predict the outcome of an RFP just by the patterns of behavior of the team leading up to the proposal. But sometimes we miss the bigger picture.
I've seen this so many times now that I've started to recognize it as a signal rather than a problem.
- Go/No-gos that don’t stick
- Late night proposal sessions
- Last minute rewrites and additions
- Strategic initiatives stalling out
All that costs time, effort, traction, and emotional energy (losing sucks). You’re spending resources on things that don’t level up the firm and are burning out because it isn’t working.
At some point, you start to realize that, while you can see the problems coming, and you have good ideas to address them, you don’t have the full context, the strategic goals or the company direction, to make the shifts. And you may not have the authority to make any changes stick.
Your people aren’t the problem. The workflow doesn’t connect effort to outcomes in a meaningful way. And that’s not something you can fix on your own or in your role.
Talking about it sounds like this:
- We’re not losing because of effort or activity – we’re chasing work that doesn’t match our strategic direction or our expertise.
- We keep trying to fix outcomes at the proposal stage instead of when and how work enters the pipeline.
- This isn’t a pursuit problem. It’s how decisions and priorities flow through the firm.
- We’re assuming a proposal is the only way to get work.
When the workflow aligns with the strategy, effort starts turning into results again. Keystone and Raven helps firms fix the disconnect between strategy and how work actually moves day to day. You don’t have to dance the same dance. It’s time to change the music. Interested in learning more? Reach out on our website at https://keystoneandraven.com/.
