Hogan Lovells Ditches the TMC RFP Process

Whoever decided that RFPs are the law of the land? Certainly not the lawyers at Hogan Lovells. The global law firm, the result of a 2010 merger between Hogan & Hartson and Lovells, prides itself on doing things a bit differently. So when deputy COO Darren Mitchell decided to choose a new U.S. travel management company that eventually could scale to replace the mishmash of TMCs serving the law firm’s other markets, he was open to consulting firm Festive Road’s proposal of a new way to shop around.

Gone are the traditional 92-page RFPs that prospective TMCs auto-fill with canned responses. Instead, Mitchell started with a list of about 20 candidates that Festive Road assembled, some well-known and some unexpected. They invited eight in for meet-and-greets and brought four of those in for a follow-up hangout.

The idea of it all was that Festive Road knew the players well enough that it could tell Hogan Lovells generally what TMCs would have said in their RFPs and later could “check the nuts and bolts and make sure that they were really up to delivering what we wanted them to be able to deliver,” Mitchell said. The face-to-face meetings filled in for Mitchell: “What’s the cultural fit going to be like? How’s it going to be working together? How well do they really understand how the market’s changing?”

“There was a lot more energy in the process” compared with an RFP, Mitchell said. “And you swiftly got to the people who you felt really understood us and really understood frankly their industry and their company.”

Festive Road managing partner Caroline Strachan framed it in terms of a quote she once heard: “Culture is how people behave when no one’s looking.” She added: “The issue with a sales process is: Of course we’re all looking, so you put your glossy image ahead as a supplier and you show up in a particular way. But … as a buyer, you want to understand how they really operate and you need to be able to visualize yourself ahead nine, 12 months’ time in that relationship and what’s it going to be like to work with these people?”

Also pivotal was who was doing the talking. Mitchell noted, “We said, ‘Don’t bring a load of marketing people who can talk in the nice fluffy stuff. Bring people who are operational, that we can then really get a sense of: These are the people who will be working with on our account.’”

The TMC that won told Mitchell recently that the process gave the agency a clear sense of what was important to Hogan Lovells. “It just helped short-circuit a lot of those things which you get to through a negotiation process,” Mitchell said, “but rather than it being a kind of a contentious thing, it was like, ‘Let’s … see how we get on, and then let’s go on a journey forward from that point.’” All told, it was an expeditious process for both the law firm and the TMC, he said.

So Who Won?

Hogan Lovells started its TMC search with the U.S. top of mind. That’s where about half its 2,500 travelers are based. Still the firm aims for a globalized travel program, and thus Lawyers Travel, a niche player that operates only in the U.S., made for “an interesting choice,” Mitchell said. “It was not necessarily the ideal solution, in that it wasn’t a natural global player, but for us, getting the quality of service and getting people who understood what it was that we were after and had a cultural fit, people who we could feel we trusted—that was a key part.”

It’s intimidating to break from norms, but bucking the TMC RFP tradition didn’t shake Mitchell’s confidence in the results. “Let’s face it: When they do these big RFP proposals and they send through a document which is 50 pages long, you never fully digest the entirety of their return anyway,” he said. “The view I took was: Frankly, if I’m going to invest time in this process, I’d much rather invest that time being in a room with these big companies to make sure that we were making the right choice in terms of fit.”