Winning RFPs

To another episode of CRE – The Unspoken Truth. I’m Charlie Coppola with my father, Craig. Today we’re talking about winning RFPs, requests for proposals, pitches. And so I want to start. My first question is, you know, young brokers, your advice to them: when is it worth chasing the big listing, the big deal, you know, spending your time on a big presentation and RFP? You know, the cost versus benefit. How did you look at that early in your career?

So if you’re young and you have a very slim chance of winning an assignment, whether it’s a landlord or a tenant rep, then the first suggestion, obviously, is you have to build the team that could win the assignment. So if you’re a young broker, and we see this all the time, young brokers think they have the experience and whatever, and then they’ll go chase a deal and they’ll lose it to somebody that has 30 or 40 years experience. And so don’t go chase something that you can’t win.

And so how do you win? Well, you know, I remember the very first big deal I got was a 30,000-foot tenant rep assignment back in the early 80s. I had just been a broker maybe a year or two. I didn’t think I could win it. So I went to Ron Evian and I said, “Ron, I think I can get this in front of it, and I want to split it with you 50/50.” And we went and pitched a tenant called Patients Choice. And that Patients Choice turned out to be a 28,000-foot deal, my first big deal. And Ron got the business because he was the senior broker. And then he actually ran the deal. And so I was like, not only did he win it, but then he actually said, “Hey, I’ll just run it.” And I got half the commission. And so that was my first lesson.

So then I parlayed that. My second big deal, maybe a year later, was a tenant called Colonial Penn Insurance, which ended up being a build-to-suit. And Ron hadn’t done a lot, but he helped me get the business. I ended up kind of running the deal and doing the build-to-suit, my first one, that I learned how to do a deal on. But early on I was like, how can we win this business? And you have to be brutally honest with yourself. You may have a great relationship with the decision maker, but he has other people he answers to, unless he owns the company. And so you have to kind of understand, he may be able to get me in the door, but he might not be able to get me to win the business.

Yeah. And you’ve said on other episodes, you should always be chasing a deal or two that’s a little outside of your comfort zone, just to keep pushing yourself and growing. On the other side of the coin, do you say, “Hey, I’m going to spend 100 hours on this thing. My time is better spent elsewhere”? Like, what helps you make that decision?

Well, again, I’m a big, you know this, we talk about this all the time, I’m a big believer in chasing things where you’re stretching your skill level, because you need a rep. And I think brokers, again, I always looked at this and said, I’m going to build a career here. Do I want one year of experience 30 times, or do I want 30 years experience? And so I’m always thinking, and I’m literally doing this right now in my own life. You know what? One, starting CRE OneSource with you, you and I. This is a rep for us, to start and build from ground zero a SaaS software company, which neither one of us had that experience before. But now we’re four years into it, and we’ve got some success, and we’ve learned a lot of lessons along the way.

Brokerage is the same way. If you’re going to be a tenant rep broker or tenant advisory, get some consulting. Do some business that’s not in your niche. Like, if you’re a tech tenant broker, get something that might be more manufacturing. Do those kinds of things that build your resume, so that when you get a chance to chase something big, you’ve done it before. Been there, done that.

Sure. Awesome. So once you’re in the, you know, you’re a finalist, whatever it is, there’s three or four, five people that you’re competing with for the business. How do you stand out? How do you build trust? You know, how do you win it, right? What’s the secret sauce or advice there?

We’ve been thinking about this. The business has changed dramatically. We are not seeing as many pitches as we’ve seen in the past. And part of the reason is the market is maturing, and so the relationships, and we’ve talked about this a number of times, the relationships are winning the business before it comes to an RFP and a pitch. So one of the things you have to understand, if there’s an RFP out there, or a pitch opportunity, is what is your relationship like?

And we have done a ton in the past. We’ve been the stalking horse, because Lee & Associates wasn’t that big, where we would be invited because we’re kind of big, but we’re not that big, and we’d lose it to one of the big boys. And so now we do a lot of homework up front, where we spend a lot of time with the people. Do we have a real shot? Or are you just filling us in? Let us know. We’ll put our pitch in, but we’re not going to kill it, because we know we’re not going to win. And so I think a lot of that, the other thing that we have to do, is really understand who you are. Do you have a real shot at this, or are they just giving you an opportunity?

And one of the things I think I’ve failed at is, I think I win everything. So I’m like, I know I’ve got a long shot, but I think I can still win this. And then we go spend a hundred hours and a bunch of money, and we don’t win it. And I’m like, I knew I didn’t have the relationship going in. I knew it was a long shot. And I’ve seen other brokers who are just really good: “I think we’re going to pass on this, because I don’t think it’s in our wheelhouse,” or whatever it is. Other brokers have done that, and I thought they probably done it better than I have. Unfortunately, chasing it all.

Yeah. “I think I can close everything.” It’s your mentality. I think it’s a good thing, and maybe a bad thing at times, but…

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Do you tailor every pitch and proposal, sales pitch, based on the client or the opportunity? I would imagine parts of it.

Yeah. Yeah, we customize everything. There’s no… Well, we are unique. I think my team’s unique. We do customize everything. Lots of brokers just put something together, and I’m shocked. Like, I had a big client where my client retired, and the new CFO was making a decision, years ago. And I spent a lot of money to kind of keep the business. And Staubach Company came in. This is Staubach, the precursor to JLL. Staubach came in, and Roger showed up, and I lost the business. You know, when Roger Staubach shows up, you’re going to lose it, despite having the tenure on there.

So, if you can understand that. But we do customize it. The one thing I will say about this customization is you have to know your audience. We just went through a pitch, and it wasn’t us, but one of the other brokers came in, and they asked him a question about some vendors, and he said, “Oh, if you want this vendor, you know, if you want this, here’s the two that we like. If you want a budget vendor, you could pick this one.” Well, one of the persons in the room that they were pitching to, it was his mom’s business. And immediately he goes, “Hey, that’s my mom’s business.” And they go, “Oh, well.” Then they’re backtracking. They didn’t know who they were talking to. So really doing some deep work and understanding who you’re talking to. You just stuck your foot in your mouth, which really is like, “You’re not going to win that business.”

Yeah. Not that I’ve ever stuck my foot in my mouth, like, in the last 48 hours or anything.

You know, we’re laughing because I have. But, you know, it does happen to us. We talk a lot, and we say, and we shouldn’t.

So when you’re tailoring things, research on everybody that’s going to be in the room, everybody part of the decision-making process. I would imagine a lot of market research on the listing or the tenant or the, you know, there’s a big segment of that in the pitch. What other ways to customize it?

Yeah. So, you know, obviously what your idea is. We just made a big pitch for a tenant rep assignment, we did last week, and we did a big pitch for a landlord, a class A landlord assignment, as well. Both were massive, and, you know, where do we win? This happened to be a law firm that we’re chasing, one of the Am Law 100 law firms, and we’ve got a lot of experience with law firms. So we lead with that. It’s like, “Hey, we’ve represented large percentages of the big law firms in Phoenix, Arizona.” And so that’s something that we’re really good at, and so that we want to lead with, like, “Hey, we know your assignment.” On the landlord side, it’s like, “We’ve done more leasing in this submarket than anybody else.” So you just kind of look at where you can go.

And I think one of the things that I’m constantly preaching to our team is, where are the three OBC areas where we’re really good and where we can win? As you know, in winning something, even on a team basis, it’s about putting your best blocker on their best shooter at the end of the game. So you have a shot at blocking that shot, or at least disrupting it. And for us, it’s the same thing. Where can we win in this, and how do we do it? And I think a lot of guys just put their stuff together and they send it out, and they go, “Why didn’t we win?” It’s like, “Well, you didn’t really think about it.”

Sure.

So my number one thing is overprepare. And that’s really hard for brokers to do. They think, you know, throwing a package together that they did 60 years ago and just dusting it off and putting it in there is overpreparing. It’s really not.

Yeah. One thing we talk about at OneSource is multi-threading, where, you know, we’re working with a broker in this office in Omaha, Nebraska, and then someone else has a good relationship with someone else in that office. And ultimately, at some point, we’ll connect the dots, and it will help us get one or multiple people over the line to sign up. Is that part of your research before a pitch, on the relationship side? Who has a connection, a relationship?

Who does this? And now it’s so easy with LinkedIn. I mean, to not know who they know is crazy, you know.

Right. You multi-thread. You do that with, you know, meetings too, right? You’ll pull up who they’re connected with on LinkedIn and get warm intros that way, or whatever, right?

Well, it’s hard. You know, our business is hard. You want as many inbound leads or easy leads as you can. I mean, we’re all calling, or most of us are calling.

Yeah.

And like, I’ve always tried to figure out how not to call, and I haven’t figured it out yet. I do see some brokers out there. We have one, our former runner, Matt Hagen. As you know, he ran for us, so he knew how to cold call and canvass. He then went on his own as an associate alone guy, and within three years he was a principal at Lee & Associates Arizona, and without making cold calls. The guy’s just super, he’s super connected. He likes being out, and he’s got a dynamite wife, and they are a power couple. And he’s learned how to make connections, and he’s really, really good at it. It pisses me off, but I’m not as good as he is. And he’s just done a great job with it.

Yeah. Yeah. That’s cool. When you’re walking out of an RFP, a pitch, a presentation you give, how often do you go, “Hey, that went really well,” or, “That went poorly”? Like, how often do you know, and how accurate is your walking-out gut feeling on how well it went?

The gut. Yeah, my gut feeling sucks on those. I think they all went well.

Yeah. Yeah. And then you find out, oh, they didn’t like this, or you could have addressed that.

You’re never going to be 100%. You think you are, but you’re not. I think it’s less about what they felt and more about what you felt. You know, you want to take feedback. You want to do a post-mortem. You do have to do that. A lot of people don’t do post-mortems. We stop immediately. We did this big landlord pitch, and we walked out, walked down the hall, and we stopped and we said, “All right, what went well? What didn’t go well? Where could we have done better?” And we do it right away. So we want to do that.

So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to give you an opportunity to tell a story, if you have one. But my question here is, have you ever lost one that you, for sure, you know, you thought you had in the bag? Or have you ever won one that felt like it came out of nowhere, and some unique thing happened where you ended up winning it? Take it either way. Either direction.

So let me, I’ll answer both. But I’ll answer the one where, I have had very, very few deals that have come out of nowhere and just called me, big deals. I’ve had small deals where they go, “Hey, I knew this person and I want that. Would you help me be?” But a big deal where I remember making a lot of money? So I would say very, very few. When you decide to leave, when you’re a smaller firm, Lee & Associates versus the big boys, we’re not getting the calls that they’re getting. We’re not getting those referrals. Now, we do get some now, because we’ve grown over the last 33 years of Lee, and Lee’s now the fifth or seventh largest firm in the country. So we do get more, but I have been sitting here for 40 years waiting for people to call me, and they just simply haven’t.

Now, on the other side, have I chased deals where I thought I was going to get them? And the answer is, I gave it earlier. Yeah. Every deal. I will say to you, early in my career, and I’m going to tie this to a lesson. Early in my career, there was a tenant called Bell Atlantic. I didn’t think I could get it on my own. I had developed a relationship with this guy over years, a couple years, three years. I thought I really knew him really well, and I’m not throwing him under the bus. His name was Mark Le Nether. No, Mark Leathers. And so I brought Jim Watkins in, who was a seasoned pro, certainly one of my mentors. So it wasn’t just me chasing it and trying to win business. It’s a 30,000-foot tenant rep. I thought we had it, and we didn’t get the business.

And it turned out that the corporate headquarters had a relationship. This is back in the day when you didn’t know that CBRE or JLL or Cushman & Wakefield had relationships, and they didn’t. And I remember losing that, and I was super despondent for three or four days, because it would have been a big fee back then. And I remember saying to myself, I will never, ever put myself in that position again, where I so depend, so want this deal so bad that… And I think I’ve told this story before on here, but I don’t want to ever be in that position, and I haven’t been there. Any deal that I’ve lost, I haven’t gotten despondent over. There’s certainly deals that I was a little bummed I didn’t get, but it’s like, I wanted to put myself in a position where I had so much pipeline that I didn’t care about that.

Yeah. You always say, pipeline is heartbeat, right? And we did another one on self-doubt, another episode, and you talked about the best cure for self-doubt and anxiety: more pipeline.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, again, I think I said it then, I’ll say it again. You know that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the father carried Windex? Every problem he had, the solution was Windex. As a real estate broker, every problem I have was more pipeline. Real pipeline, not BS pipeline.

Right. Right. Right. That’s good. So, any specific stories? I asked the question. I’ll ask one more follow-up. Any specific stories? One where you thought you had in the bag but didn’t, or came out of the blue?

No, no. I don’t want to open those wounds. We have to move on from them. And, you know, we have to learn it. It is one thing that you and I talk about a lot, and this is kind of an unspoken truth, is you lose it, you’re super bummed about it. Take the lessons learned and write them down, and then email yourself on your next pitch and go, “Look, I did not spend enough time preparing for us. We’re actually practicing.” You know, we got the presentation done the night before. We walked into the presentation and we didn’t know who was going to say what part of it, who was going to talk to what. Those kind of things that just are dumb, and you’ve got to learn them once, and then you should never do them again.

And I’ve had a hundred dumb things that I’ve done maybe twice, but never three times. You know, it’s like, I am a slow learner, but I do ultimately learn, and when you learn, you get better at it. So now I can go, look, I’ll give you one tip. We did presentations where we’d bring our young runners in, and we didn’t have them talk. And somebody said, “Why are you bringing these guys in? You don’t have them talk. You can tell you’re a dysfunctional team.” And so now, if you’re going to show up at our meeting, you’re going to talk. That’s just one of these hundreds of lessons that you learn by getting reps and wisdom.

So, yeah, it’s good. I like it. We started with always pushing, always getting reps, always stretching yourself a bit. So I think that’s a good place to end, too. But I appreciate it. Winning RFPs, pitches, The Unspoken Truth. It’s good. Thank you.

Thank you.