Other considerations - time, budget, location, travel, etc.
Make sure to book a call with likely vendors - it adds time, but how can you be sure they understand your full context if you don’t connect first?
Be wary of vendors who just want to submit a proposal and aren't willing to invest in time for a chat.
Writing a Strategic Planning RFP is a great way to ensure that your organization has a clear process to select your best strategic planning consultant or facilitator.
While direct procurement is a stronger, more collaborative approach to selecting a strategic planning facilitator and service provider, some organizations may be required to work through an RFP process to select a vendor from a short list of 3-4 top providers.
Your organization may receive many proposals in response to your strategic planning RFP, so it is critical that it is well developed so that the bids you receive are aligned with the outcomes you would like to achieve from the strategic planning process.
By ensuring your RFP is aligned with strategic planning best practices, while also leaving room for expert input from the bidding organizations, you will reduce the risk of wasting valuable time and resources reviewing proposals that don’t fit your needs. Instead, you will optimize your resources and better equip your leadership team to narrow down the top providers who will deliver the best results for your organization.
A well developed strategic plan considers input from critical stakeholders, and is not developed in a silo. It’s important that your leadership team or strategic planning committee considers how you would like to gather considerations and input ahead of the strategic plan development, and whether this is something you will undertake internally or with the support of a facilitator.
Stakeholder engagement sessions can help gather insights and input from key external or internal individuals and groups to help you better understand your current state and to increase the likelihood for buy-in around your future state once your strategic plan is developed.
Additionally, robust internal stakeholder engagement (i.e. with board or key team members) before AND after the strategic plan development can help improve the likelihood for ongoing alignment and performance around strategy execution.
Working with a facilitator can help you optimize these benefits as they are an objective, third-party who is skilled in asking the right questions and getting key critical input out of engagement sessions. If facilitated stakeholder engagement is something you would like to include as a part of your strategic planning process, consider mapping out your stakeholder groups to determine how many sessions you would like to hold and to uncover any unique needs or accommodations different groups or individuals may have.
Additionally, there are other research activities that are separate from strategic planning that some organizations may wish to undertake to help inform the planning process. These activities may include market research, organizational benchmarking, or other R&D activities.
If your organization is interested in these activities, consider developing a separate RFP for activities that are adjacent to strategic planning: The best strategic planning experts may not be marketing or research experts, and the best marketing and research experts may not be skilled in strategic planning or facilitation.
When developing a strategic plan, it’s important for everyone with decision making power and those who will be leading the implementation to have a seat at the table. While there is no magic number, having between 7-14 key leaders collaborate around One Destination for your organization’s future tends to be a good range. With 6 or less individuals, you may not have enough different views and perspectives to inform decisions. With 15 or more individuals, the process can take a lot longer, and it can be more challenging to reach alignment, especially if there are different levels of decision making power in the room.
Participant arrangements that we have seen work well include:
To ensure the sessions are productive and collaborative, it’s critical to ensure that all session participants have cleared their schedules so they can commit to a distraction-free strategic planning process.
When writing your RFP, it’s important to consider who you would like at the table, and who you would like to engage so that the bidding organization can scope an ideal number of engagement sessions and allocate enough time for strategic alignment that considers the size and complexity of your group.
Since some people will not have a seat at the decision making table during the planning sessions, pre-planning stakeholder engagement is a great way to generate input from these key individuals and groups. This will help narrow down the session participants to a smaller team of 7-14 leaders that can make key strategic decisions for the organization while considering stakeholder perspectives and key themes.
While there are various activities that facilitators can employ to develop a strategic plan with an organization, there are critical components that should be incorporated into every strategic planning process in order to support alignment towards a vision with clarity around how this destination will be reached.
Once your leadership team has aligned around where you are now and where you want to be in 3-5 years, it’s time to unpack what could get in the way of reaching your One Destination.
No strategic plan is risk free, so focusing on both internal and external factors that could slow down or derail success is a valuable process to help design your tactics to reach your vision and mission.
Ideal activities in this section may include a discussion around how your organizational values and behaviours can either help or hinder you from reaching your future state (depending on whether or not they are aligned with where you want to go), and a fulsome risk assessment.
On the other hand, it’s equally critical to ensure that your chosen facilitator has developed a fulsome process that considers elements of each of the five steps above so that you can have a complete and implementable strategic plan.
Learn more about our strategic planning process to help you write your strategic planning RFP.
When searching for a strategic planning facilitator, it’s important to understand that, while not impossible, it’s unlikely that a consultant or organization who are experts in your niche field are also experts in strategic planning. Therefore, it’s highly likely that the most skilled strategic planning facilitators are experts in strategy, and not necessarily within your specific field. Another risk with hiring an industry expert to lead your strategic planning process is that they may arrive to your sessions with unconscious bias about your industry and field, which may lead to a narrow scope and subjective lens.
If it’s essential for your procurement process to ensure that your facilitator has experience developing strategic plans in your industry, make sure you reflect on why that expertise is critical and how the facilitator is expected to apply this knowledge. If you are looking for advice on decision making, consider hiring an industry consultant to work directly with your team alongside having a strategic planning facilitator rather than trying to find a facilitator who is also a subject matter expert in a niche field.
The benefit of hiring a facilitator who is an expert in alignment and strategic planning is that they will arrive with an objective lens, less industry bias, and will be ready to support your team with creative thinking and innovation. A strong strategic planning facilitator will still ensure to inform themselves about your sector, industry, and organization, as well as interview key stakeholders and team members ahead of the session so they can understand your team and your context.
Ultimately, it’s critical that your strategic planning facilitator is an expert in two areas: the strategic planning process and facilitating alignment towards a singular vision (One Destination).
When developing an RFP for strategic planning, there are various other considerations you may wish to incorporate:
As you write your RFP, consider if and when you will accept calls from qualified vendors so they can understand your organization better before crafting a proposal. If you decide not to take calls, there is a risk that prospective bidders may not fully understand what it is you want or are trying to achieve. While it may take more time on the front end to accept calls to clarify information for interested bidders, you will spend less of your valuable time reading a lot of long proposals that aren’t tailored to your needs or what you would like to accomplish.
Another benefit of having a conversation with potential facilitators ahead of your selection process is that there may be considerations you were not aware of when you wrote your RFP that the facilitator can bring forward. Therefore, the facilitator will not only understand your desires for how the process will unfold, but it will give you an opportunity to understand how their expertise and carefully designed processes can be applied to your strategic planning session.
Consider ahead of time what the best format will be for your strategic planning team. Some teams would prefer to work through this process intensively over a few days in-person, while other teams may find it more effective to spread the process out over a few weeks virtually, with more time and space between each session. If you decide to have your session in-person, consider where you would like to hold your session such as in a boardroom at your workplace, at an offsite location, at a retreat center, or elsewhere.
If you are unsure about which option is best for your team, learn more about the different benefits of virtual and in-person strategic planning.
Timing:
Prior to releasing your RFP, consider determining an approximate time that you would like to work through your stakeholder engagement and the strategic planning sessions. If you pre-select specific dates however, be aware that this could weed out great facilitators who might not have availability on those exact dates. Instead, consider ample lead time (at least 3-6 months) and identify some target weeks that the sessions could occur so that you can collaborate on dates and times with the facilitator best suited for your needs.
While it may be tempting to omit a budget to see what bidding organizations propose without any monetary biases, listing your budget range will allow the bidding organizations to tailor their offerings to your desired outcomes in line with your budget rather than guessing at how much you want to spend, which could result in either over bidding or under bidding.
While requesting one reference as a final step in your selection process can be an effective way to vet your top proposals, consider utilizing vetted third party testimonials early in the process rather than several references in order to narrow down your top candidates. This way, you don’t have to spend your time making several phone calls for several bidders as a part of your selection process, but can instead call just one reference for your top two or three candidates after pre-vetting them.
SME Strategy and many other consulting organizations use Clutch for vetted third party testimonials.
Consider if you will need leadership training, capacity building or accountability support as you implement your plan. While many organizations are concerned primarily with developing their strategic plan, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Strategic plans can be developed over days and weeks, while they take several years to implement. It’s critical that your team has the skills, abilities, and capacities to execute the strategies you’ve created, otherwise your plan may be shelved. If you are interested in facilitated implementation support, consider what your budget will look like, both in terms of money and time.