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Blog: Craig SchiffMain | The Fight with Finance » RFP MadnessEveryone hates RFPs (Request for Proposal). The end users that send them out hate creating them and reviewing them. The vendors hate having to respond to them. They don't even accomplish much. Most vendors learned a long time ago that they need to find a way to say 'yes' to every question posed to them. So the end result is an unpleasant, costly, time consuming process, that leaves everyone back where they started: trying to reduce a long list of vendors to a short list. Since this process has been so ineffective I can't understand why it is now spreading. In the past the RFP process was primarily reserved for software vendors. At least it made some sense there. Software products do have different feature sets and trying to figure out who does what and how was at least a well-intentioned endeavor. Now we are seeing RFPs on a regular basis at my company (a consulting company). To me, this makes even less sense. Everyone knows all consultants do everything and they do it well (more on this in a future entry) so what could you possibly ask them to help differentiate other than price? One of our prospects has a $ 10,000 project and they are going through an RFP process. They took about 2 months to prepare the RFP and have been reviewing the responses for about a month now. $ 10,000! Are they crazy or am I for responding to it?
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Comments
Well, I'm not going to say you're crazy. I run a website called the RFP Database (http://www.rfpdb.com) that is a free portal for people to post RFPs and to find RFPs to bid on. You can approach RFPs two ways: you can bid on all that you're qualified for, or you can bid on the ones that you feel you have a substantial chance of winning. My company, Confluent Forms LLC (http://www.confluentforms.com), initially went the route of bidding on all projects we were qualified to bid on, and even some we weren't. We had thought that if we threw enough darts at the target, hopefully one would stick. Talk about LOTS of wasted time with little return. Now we just apply to the ones that we're local to and honestly feel we're going to win. And you know what? Our win percentage is much higher and our hours are much more productive.
Posted by: David Kutcher | January 11, 2007 8:42 AM