16 ms·

Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on

331 points by asyncscrum 5y ago

TYPE_FASTER 5y ago
One customer took our RFP to a trade show and walked the booth floor showing it to competitors to see if anybody would beat the price. We knew because they told us.
gumby 5y ago
This is also the case for most government contracts, including many/most NSF funding opportunities: talk to the program manager first; if they are interested they'll tell you what they'd really like to see. Ideally talk to them (months) before the opportunity is issued so it talks about your strengths.
epgui 5y ago
alexbrower 5y ago
As a startup, there are two reasons why you’d ever consider filling out one of these RFPs: 1) you can paste bullet points from your pricing page directly into it and you’re not being dishonest by doing so 2) you have developed a champion internally (in which case, the bullet points from your pricing page should be pasted into it) If you’re selling into an enterprise and haven’t reached a security or procurement review, but have been asked for a lengthy RFP response, focus team effort elsewhere.
dano 5y ago
Indeed, I used to write specifications about my products and services which could be turned into an RFP and it was interesting to see our own capabilities returned to us in the form of a question. The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix. As for white papers, on the networking and security side, we wrote our white papers with the IT and Security Professional in mind. We were respectful fo their knowledge, vocabulary, and spoke at a high level of complexity; i.e., we didn't dumb anything down. The introduction to the paper clearly indicated that we would be using terms and concepts familiar to such professionals and that they were free to contact us with questions. Generally the paper would be handed to someone in their engineering / IT department and when the time came, they would agree that having our service on their network was a non-issue. Know your audience and treat them with the respect they've earned and deserve.
- solarkraft 4y ago
  > The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix Has anything negative happened due to that? Were you ever outbidden?
pjmlp 5y ago
> The thing is, nobody really needs 80% of the shit that's in an RFP, and they will never hold you to that They will, they really will, specially if they are government agencies.
WelcomeShorty 5y ago
One great manager I worked for taught me to appreciate the time spend / wasted by our suppliers so what I effectively was thought was: Send a (light on volume) RFI to the top 10 Pick out minimal 3, maximum 5 and send them a RFP Pick out minimal 2, maximum 3 for a RFQ Every round all the suppliers had a change to ask questions that would be anonymized and answered to all. This way we would protect and honour the resources of all parties involved. Decent write up about RFI RFP RFQ: https://www.cobalt.net/rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference/ https://www.cobalt.net/rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference/
nargella 5y ago
This was a reason I left a job. The company I worked for was focused on government RFPs. During the Obama administration there were promises to support small minority and vet owned businesses. The company was failing to win any contract of substance. So one day we bid on a contract to provide dell servers. Out of desperation, the other members of the team decided to go lower than business could allow. Turns out we finally won something… which we weren’t ‘designed’ to win. Dell came screaming in on the phone asking what the hell we were doing. Dell had written the RFP and ‘partnered’ with a small company to basically win the contract outright. That’s when I learned the system was rigged and it still favored big companies and their selected friends.
arrakis2021 5y ago
Having read and filled out dozens of RFPs I can confirm almost all of them read like this. this is spot on.
988747 5y ago
Truth is, most of corporate directors have their favorite, battle-tested vendors, but are still required, by corporate policy, to go through some formal RFP process which they see as annoyance. That's why they go through unofficial channels: my company has been asked, on multiple occasions, to help write RFP which we later responded to (and won, of course).
lukasfischer 5y ago
I had to smile while reading the post as I experienced this many times. It’s a shame. The question remains: How can this be improved? Especially critically when public money is spent on large scale multi million projects. As a citizen, I would like to see a “fair” bidding process where the “best” supplier wins.
- morsch 5y ago
  A few things lend themselves directly from the article: More expertise on the buyer side overall (less reliance on a vendor to co-author the RFP). Better processes on the buyer side in order to lessen the one-upmanship regarding requirements. Both of these are easier said than done, of course, because if you had the expertise and the processes, why even hire somebody else? In ideal world, the answer is that you could do it, but you chose to spend your resources (your experts' time) somewhere else, e.g. writing more RFPs. Probably not very realistic for most businesses, but on the scale of governments, they really ought to have the necessary in house expertise. (But I'm sure they almost never do, whether it's building a bridge, buying a tank or developing an IT project.)
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  Honestly, I don't think it can. Public perception cannot tolerate failure/issues - even if there are huge efficiency gains by not requiring _everything_ to be put through the process.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    RFPs are only one tool in public procurement. Usually you go the RFP route for a novel project that you don’t want to manage. I have too many years of experience in the space. The successful projects are always owned by government managers and RFP or RFQs off of centralized contracts (ie GSA) for specific tasks or people. It is simple. If you can’t manage the project, you probably can’t spec it either. And if you can spec it, only time to market is a ideal reason to RFP.
- wodenokoto 5y ago
  Sitting on the other end, it can be super frustrating having to go with the lowest bidder, which you very well know aren’t up to the task, but they managed to fill out the bid adequately at the lowest price. From here on it’s a battle to get the spirit of the bid and not some useless interpretation of what you asked for. It’s also a common tactic to seriously underbid and make up for it by overcharging for changes.
atldev 5y ago
So true. I once received an RFP template where our competitor had forgotten to clear their company (and even author) from the document details. I was glad because it helped us avoid a complete waste of time.
- jjkaczor 5y ago
  So - over the past three years, I had an extremely part-time regional government client who I worked with maybe 40-60hrs per year through a friend's boutique consultancy, mostly as a favor. Last spring, I prepared a migration roadmap, including some initial estimates. Apparently, when they sent out their RFP, they included my name and the majority of my roadmap. My current client (a large, multi-national consultancy) was reviewing to bid - and someone recognized my name and reached out to me internally. We all had a laugh when I explained how tiny the actual project would be - heck, my friend didn't even respond to the RFP as it would be too much headache and not within his niche focus area. (Overall - this article is very accurate in my experience, I have been on both sides of the process, and typically it is a complete waste of time, resources and energy)
edko 5y ago
Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.
- victor_e 5y ago
  I interviewed at a bank shortly after I graduated college. We had to do an exam as part of the interview process and for that a few candidates were at the office at the same time. I learned that one of the candidates worked there previously and was known to the hiring team. Immediately I knew I wasn't getting that job!
- MegaButts 5y ago
  > Some companies I'm genuinely asking - are there companies that don't do this? I guess excluding companies with something like <20 people.
  - mulmen 5y ago
    Of course there are. If all companies only publish job openings as a charade and know who they want to hire why go through the charade?
    - MegaButts 5y ago
      You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you have a position. The question is if you already know who you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?
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Overtonwindow 5y ago
This happens a lot in government contracting…
- saynay 5y ago
  I see a lot of Franken-RFPs in government contracting. You get sections that are just word-for-word recreations of a products spec sheet, straight off their website. But different sections are from different, competing, products. So the end RFP is something that no one actually has, and then they are required to award the project to whoever made the lowest bid. 5 years later, when that project inevitably fails, they do it all over again.
- p_l 5y ago
  F-35B happened essentially to ensure Lockheed-Martin won JSF bid, as far as I know.
jseliger 5y ago
I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and this happens all the time with public agencies: https://seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-associates-never-responds-to-rfpsrfqs-for-grant-writing-services/ https://seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-associates-never-...
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  I know that blog post is from 2009, but it has a typo in the title and a typo in the first sentence. I'm not sure it's great content marketing for a company whose primary business is writing.
  - aaronchall 5y ago
    In Spanish and Portuguese "espond" means to answer. Perhaps it's a bit of cynical differentiation signalling. If so, you'll certainly never hear their gratitude for pointing out the error so it can be corrected. If not... hey, perhaps you will. Good luck.
- ricksunny 5y ago
  100%. (Also involved on the proposing / applying side of grant writing here).
_jal 5y ago
When we were starting a consulting company back when, we fell for this once. As the article states, once you're aware that this happens, it usually isn't hard to spot the signs. After that, if we suspected we were being suckered for someone else's process checkbox, we'd offer to write a response at our normal hourly rate, and actually got a taker once. But in general, this stuff will bleed you dry when you're starting out, be careful.
danbmil99 5y ago
So you're saying, there's gambling in Casablanca? Who knew? (your competitor did) I think there is a corollary to "If you don't know who the sucker is -- it's you": "If you didn't have the inside track crafting the RFP to your specs, you won't win the bid."
Kalanos 5y ago
It typically requires a lot of time from your best ppl to respond to RFPs
- asyncscrum 5y ago
  This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10 account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the presentation layer.
bell-cot 5y ago
Flip-side, an honest & competent purchaser can use "cooked" RFP's to try to weed out incompetent, indifferently-honest, cost-overrun-prone, etc. would-be suppliers, when they're forced to follow a "publish RFP and take bids" rulebook.
- orangepurple 5y ago
  I don't quite understand
  - Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
    Any sales process large enough to require an RFP will attract low-cost bidders who write good proposals but consistently fail to deliver quality work. Writing an RFP that's specific to a single company is one way to avoid dealing with the low-cost bidders.
- asyncscrum 5y ago
  Yes this is also an additional gotcha that makes this process an even deeper quagmire.
tetha 5y ago
Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Like, we've received the wrong questionaire once. It contained the question what we would do if armed forces intruded into our secured facilities to seize assets. We eventually settled on the answer "Run or hide, while calling the cops". At that point the customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny. In other areas, the consulting teams and us are developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer how nothing is possible due to security policies and compliance and further discussion requires meetings with people with long job titles. And suddenly, deal breakers aren't that important anymore. And sometimes you can even team up with the customers infosec department this way in order to simplify things into a both more secure and easier path. The best way we've found around this is to write white papers for commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It's great for our sales guys to be able to answer common questions with a PDF with a bit of glamour, but with enough incomprehensibility density to look important and to get forwarded to infosec / CISOs. Yes I'm a bit jaded about the process.
- spc476 5y ago
  You didn't reply with "Witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational sysadmin!"? (ref: https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/)
- jrumbut 5y ago
  People who write those white papers deserve everything good in the world. Being able to answer a whole genre of questions with an email attachment is a wonderful feeling.
- na85 5y ago
  >Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Not just B2B. I've worked the technical requirements side of government military procurement. I routinely had people telling me I was "too junior to be this jaded" and the experience probably prematurely aged me 10 years.
- greggsy 5y ago
  >”developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer” This is genius and I must know more..
brightball 5y ago
When I didn't realize this was how the process worked, I once spent 2 weeks and about $5k meeting all of the requirements for the RFP including the amount of formally printed copies of the 200 page proposal had to be provided. Had delivered them. I was more than a little bothered afterwards because of the sheer amount of time and money put in. They didn't even bother to give us a courtesy call to let us know we weren't selected. In the end, they ended up hiring a company that was a friend of the head of marketing who delivered something completely different than what they'd asked for in the RFP. Frustrating all around especially because of the number of people that were involved in putting the whole thing together.
- brightball 5y ago
  Apparently typing this on my phone was a bad idea. Apologies for the multiple typos. facepalm
n_o_u 5y ago
I've experienced this a number of times and it's mostly frustrating. Recently though, we've had two customers come back to us after their "preferred" vendor failed to execute. So even if they have a competitor in mind, it's sometimes good to get in front of them regardless.
- rdtwo 5y ago
  Did you charge double the initial ask?
mgkimsal 5y ago
I wrote the outline of what became an RFP for a university on site tech training program. Someone else won. At the time, we were about the only people doing this. Certainly the outline referenced things that we'd developed training material for, and we were early in this market. However another company 'won' because they were local, and didn't have to factor in travel costs (we had flights and multiple hotel rooms for a week factored in). The university was 'bound' to go with the lower bid, because they were claiming the 'same' material (which... they couldn't have at the time). Internal trainees reached out later and said it was pretty bad, to the point where they were telling the instructor how to do stuff during the class. But... they got the 'lowest' bid...
drc500free 5y ago
With government contracting, your competitor didn't just write the RFP, they wrote the budget line item that congress approved. You needed to be there 4 years ago when appropriation started.
zerkten 5y ago
You want to avoid RFPs except where you can exploit them. For example, if you are able to get by with smaller customers for a while, you can use the RFP process to gain access to stakeholders and test out ideas. Procurement departments are often keen to encourage more participation to help cover for the fact the decisions have been made, but as long as you aren't taken in, then it's less of a problem. In government and some industries, they may have opportunities for smaller orgs through other entry points, but the main RFP entry point can be easier to work out.
random3 5y ago
:) reminds me of my first company - I was still in college and we bid for selling computers and printers to the national railways company. I negotiated for weeks with IBM and HP. We made our proposal (sealed envelope type). We won. One week later HP faxed the railway company that they retracted our "warranty authorization" (or something like that). We got disqualified. Another blessed HP partner was supposed to win and HP solved the issue. I shut off the company and graduated CS.
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  I'm sure this was a long time ago, but this is one of those "consult a lawyer" moments to me. Going back and finishing CS was probably the more productive option, however.
indymike 5y ago
I used to have a rule for my sales team: Never respond to an RFP you did not write. Most naive salespeople would complain about it and point out how ethics rules prevented vendors from writing RFPs. I'd then point out the similarities in the RFP to the competitors product descriptions on their websites and documentation.
- zamadatix 5y ago
  As with most absolutes I'm not sure I could agree with this being a never thing over a "make sure you're really weighing the value of the attempt instead of drinking too much of your own kool-aid" thing. Even if you think it's impossible to sway anyone predisposed to a particular vendor's solution because you can't match the RFP to the word sometimes even just answering the RFP as if it weren't written for a specific vendor can cause the customer to think "Hey, maybe it's worth trying a real RFP next time... or at least reach out to these guys and seeing what they have before I write it" which can be a way better relationship starter than a cold call/email.
  - indymike 5y ago
    The only exception I've seen is commodity RFPs. I.e. 100 model aasi392-g widgets. Those are won or lost on price and availability and most companies doing those purchases use reverse auction models anyway...
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  This is 100% valid. Unless you personally influenced the RFP and have a champion who has told you you’re the preferred vendor, it is a guaranteed waste of time.
- mindtricks 5y ago
  I'm not sure I 100% agree with the rule, but sales teams should definitely consider it deeply. It's worth the money for a sales team that understands this process. If your team isn't influencing the RFP, that means they have no real relationship with the client and relevant stakeholders. You'll likely just pull in cost-conscious or high-maintenance clients.
dagw 5y ago
Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean you'll always win it. I've been involved in cases where we had pretty much designed and sold in the project and basically wrote the RFP and then some other company came along offered to do it at a significantly lower price.
hpcjoe 5y ago
Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A well known large/prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid. We did. We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP. They never took our bid seriously. Small company with a great rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh reps. Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used another vendor as its stalking horse. We constructed our bid aggressively, and submitted. Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida, the purchasing agent called me up. She wanted me to teach the other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far better performance, etc.) I asked why. She said they liked our solution. They just didn't want to buy from us. We'd won the RFP. But lost the business. Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn't understand why we wouldn't do this for them. I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc. Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for something. I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. Yeah. I've shared some of these anecdotes with others in this industry, and we all nod our heads. All of us have run into this before. Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine. An interesting tangent: I currently work for a company whose RFP we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were too small. That's happened multiple times throughout my career. Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we "lost". Can be disheartening.
- mcv 5y ago
  > I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc. My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it. In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.
Shank 5y ago
> In the case of RFPs, think of it like you’re buying a logo. You want this nice logo on your website, in case studies, in press releases and in CEO powerpoint decks. What is this logo worth to you? This is actually the opposite of true for big companies. Some companies let you use their logo, but most enterprise agreements will prohibit this explicitly. If you see a logo on a website, unless it’s associated with a formal case study or testimonial, it’s probably just an indicator that one person on the domain signed up at one point. If the logo later is removed and replaced with a different company, it’s usually because they’ve signed a contract or been C&D’d and can’t show it anymore.
MauranKilom 5y ago
The article doesn't care to mention what RFP even means. So I'll be the guy in the comments asking: "WTF does RFP stand for?"
- toyg 5y ago
  https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.as... "A request for proposal (RFP) is a business document that announces a project, describes it, and solicits bids from qualified contractors to complete it." Basically, it's a long laundry list of requirements for things you want to buy (e.g. software), with some vague justification attached. It's a thing in big companies and public institutions, which are supposed to have a high degree of oversight on any move they make. In practice, it's just another source of Bullshit Jobs, since the company publishing an RFP has likely already decided what they are going to buy and just have to go through the motions - a bit like those companies publishing job ads because they have to, when they already know who they are going to hire.
- bombcar 5y ago
  Request for proposal. Basically a list of requirements for something, and then someone will reply to it with a quote.
- rav 5y ago
  Apparently, "Request for proposal", which is a private-sector equivalent of a tender process (speaking from my point of view of doing a lot of consulting projects for the public sector). A tender process usually requires the agency to pick the quantitatively best bid (by some predetermined ranking scale, usually price or some price-quality combination), whereas an RFP has no such requirement and just lets the agency pick whatever seems subjectively/qualitatively the best choice.
micheljansen 5y ago
Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor do it for them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but a little bias is almost impossible to avoid.
rootusrootus 5y ago
So how to you get into B2B if the deck is stacked this hard against smaller/newer companies? Hang out a shingle somewhere with a sticker price and refuse to do any RFPs? Schmooze a lot and hope to finally get on the other side of the RFP process?
- arrakis2021 5y ago
  Bottoms-up product and self-service. PLG companies are eating the B2B pie by subverting these bureaucratic processes. Some of the best SaaS products are unwilling to even speak with you unless you’re already using the product. Sure, this doesn’t solve the big enterprise RFP process - but it makes for a much better pipeline.
- djrogers 5y ago
  Having been through this several times, you usually start out with a differentiated product, represented by boutique resellers, and pitch/sell to early adopter types. After you've gotten a little bit of runway under you, you can start targeting a broader array of resellers and customers, and grow from there.
  - sitkack 5y ago
    This is where OSS can really literally and metaphorically get you in the door. But you will mostly also see occurrences of the big consulting shops using the same software. So it cuts both ways.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  You look for procurement lobbyists and partners like system integrators and leverage those relationships. Also, you need to figure out if it’s wise. Big companies or government agencies will murder you with insurance and compliance requirements before they give you a nickel.
Andy_G11 5y ago
If the actual bid is not going to go your way no matter what, and if possible, just advertise subsidiary products which might be bolt-ons to other projects that the customer may want. That way, you give the sham process a veneer of respectability (which will no doubt be appreciated by both competitors and customer) and still get to raise the customer's awareness of some things that they might actually want to buy from you.
Mulpze15 5y ago
ROI of RFPs... It is so depressing for me to spend time on an RFP that I won't do it unless I am 100% convinced the RFP was written for me, because I know the account/people. It's not just the time spent on it, it's the feeling of powerlessness and wasting time you could be spending on something much more fulfilling. So much more fun to say "no, I won't bid" after a few emails, with little work behind it.
commandlinefan 5y ago
> We need to integrate with Qlik!! We need a data warehouse! We need to restrict access to the app to certain IP ranges! But the time range and price quote never changes...
stormcode 5y ago
I worked at a digital agency for years. This is the most true thing I've read in ages. Every single point struck a nerve with me. I honestly wish I'd read and believed this before starting my job there. It would have saved me endless hours of stress and pushing back with my leadership about technical requirements that went nowhere.
duxup 5y ago
> Must-have requirements that will never ever be used by anyone Heck sometimes the folks who created the requirement forget they were the one who created the requirement, and certainly forgot why… Or my favorite they requested it, forgot it was their request, and they make a big stink about why it is there. I got that one this week. Fortunately no real consequences aside from me shaking my head with my camera off / off camera. In my experience these situations are as much a company exploring “what do we even do here?” as much as looking at software or services.
ineedasername 5y ago
>These may or may not be actually important requirements for this prospect to be successful This is why most people who've been around even a little while grow to hate sales reps and the sales process in general, especially those large enough for an RFP. This clearly shows a demonstrable tendency towards the mercenary "close the deal no matter what" that is so pervasive. And it is usually very short sighted as well, because this is how you acquire customers that grow to hate you, bad mouth you whenever the opportunity arises, and switches to a competitor when possible, having learned enough about that product ecosystem to hopefully cut through the bullshit the next time around.
antiterra 5y ago
I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system design only for the customer to just hire a generic development contractor to implement it. They thought they got smart by adding a contract to the process that had a six digit contracting fee if the customer went with another vendor. The first big fish was more than happy to pay their consulting fee and then develop everything in house. To them, the fee (which didn’t really cover the opportunity cost or development time) was a pittance.
- stainforth 5y ago
  I guess increase the fee then?
notyourday 5y ago
We have an official answer of how we respond to RFPs - we send an invoice for "RFP response" * $5,000/h * 10h minimum It is cathartic to hear the freak out on the other side. We also say "No" to "Fill out this questionnaire" or "We need answers to the following questions". You either have a product they want at which point they will figure out how to ignore their rules to get you, or you do not have a product that they want and you are wasting your time doing "enterprise sales"
- solarkraft 4y ago
  What kind of business is it and how many clients does it lose you?
  - notyourday 4y ago
    SaaS. I do not believe it loses us any clients -- responding to RFPs or filling out questionnaires are a waste of our time. If they want us to jump through those hoops they are not our customer. We simply do not give a shit about "their procedure". Our procedure is : credit card gets charged or wire hits our account and you can use our services for 30 days. We bill you on a day 25. If you do not pay by the 1st, your service gets shut off in 1 minute after your "paid for" period is over. We do not restore the service until you pay us. We have gone this way after in a previous company I was involved with found that it is cheaper to sell invoices to factoring companies that take 30-50% than chase checks from companies with signed contracts
kamroot 5y ago
I ran a product management team in a fairly large B2B cloud-software company for one 5 years. Enterprise RFPs are a huge pain. And yes, we could immediately tell when one of the RFPs that we were working on was written by a competitor. We also tried to influence the RFP for a customer. When we gotten fairly large we had a dedicated group of people whose primary responsibility was to respond to RFP from a library of questions.
ArchitectAnon 5y ago
Here’s a what I do in my industry: Architecture. I refuse invitation to tender for services where there are more than 3 bidders. I phone the person managing the tender and ask if they have a preferred Architect already and I say that I don’t mind if they do and I’m happy to provide a tender so they can show they’ve tried to get 3 bids but I would rather not waste a week putting together a proposal and a concept design etc. This works well for me. Open tenders are typically won by firms that specialise in scatter gun bidding and the results will usually be poor quality. A firm with a good design track record doesn’t need to win work this way so they won’t waste time on them.
- ProjectArcturis 5y ago
  Why do you bother putting in a tender that will have zero chance of being accepted? Even if it's low effort for you?
  - TOMDM 5y ago
    I'm not the op, but being on friendly terms with people handling bids, doing small things even like helping them cross of simple policy things like "considering three options" can do wonders for your future bids.
    - rukuu001 5y ago
      Exactly. You want these people to feel a little warm glow when they think of you.
    - hinkley 5y ago
      Also constantly reminding them that you exist and are still in business... I can't imagine you'd put in a bid if you're full up on projects, so you probably have some free time and putting together a proposal, even if it doesn't go anywhere (or perhaps especially if it doesn't) is you practicing your art. You could use the proposal to show off new concepts you are trying to iron out, for instance.
  - lmeyerov 5y ago

331 points by asyncscrum 5y ago

One customer took our RFP to a trade show and walked the booth floor showing it to competitors to see if anybody would beat the price. We knew because they told us.

gumby 5y ago

This is also the case for most government contracts, including many/most NSF funding opportunities: talk to the program manager first; if they are interested they'll tell you what they'd really like to see. Ideally talk to them (months) before the opportunity is issued so it talks about your strengths.

epgui 5y ago

alexbrower 5y ago

As a startup, there are two reasons why you’d ever consider filling out one of these RFPs: 1) you can paste bullet points from your pricing page directly into it and you’re not being dishonest by doing so 2) you have developed a champion internally (in which case, the bullet points from your pricing page should be pasted into it) If you’re selling into an enterprise and haven’t reached a security or procurement review, but have been asked for a lengthy RFP response, focus team effort elsewhere.

dano 5y ago

Indeed, I used to write specifications about my products and services which could be turned into an RFP and it was interesting to see our own capabilities returned to us in the form of a question. The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix. As for white papers, on the networking and security side, we wrote our white papers with the IT and Security Professional in mind. We were respectful fo their knowledge, vocabulary, and spoke at a high level of complexity; i.e., we didn't dumb anything down. The introduction to the paper clearly indicated that we would be using terms and concepts familiar to such professionals and that they were free to contact us with questions. Generally the paper would be handed to someone in their engineering / IT department and when the time came, they would agree that having our service on their network was a non-issue. Know your audience and treat them with the respect they've earned and deserve.

solarkraft 4y ago
> The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix Has anything negative happened due to that? Were you ever outbidden?

pjmlp 5y ago

> The thing is, nobody really needs 80% of the shit that's in an RFP, and they will never hold you to that They will, they really will, specially if they are government agencies.

WelcomeShorty 5y ago

One great manager I worked for taught me to appreciate the time spend / wasted by our suppliers so what I effectively was thought was: Send a (light on volume) RFI to the top 10 Pick out minimal 3, maximum 5 and send them a RFP Pick out minimal 2, maximum 3 for a RFQ Every round all the suppliers had a change to ask questions that would be anonymized and answered to all. This way we would protect and honour the resources of all parties involved. Decent write up about RFI RFP RFQ: https://www.cobalt.net/rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference/ https://www.cobalt.net/rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference/

nargella 5y ago

This was a reason I left a job. The company I worked for was focused on government RFPs. During the Obama administration there were promises to support small minority and vet owned businesses. The company was failing to win any contract of substance. So one day we bid on a contract to provide dell servers. Out of desperation, the other members of the team decided to go lower than business could allow. Turns out we finally won something… which we weren’t ‘designed’ to win. Dell came screaming in on the phone asking what the hell we were doing. Dell had written the RFP and ‘partnered’ with a small company to basically win the contract outright. That’s when I learned the system was rigged and it still favored big companies and their selected friends.

arrakis2021 5y ago

Having read and filled out dozens of RFPs I can confirm almost all of them read like this. this is spot on.

988747 5y ago

Truth is, most of corporate directors have their favorite, battle-tested vendors, but are still required, by corporate policy, to go through some formal RFP process which they see as annoyance. That's why they go through unofficial channels: my company has been asked, on multiple occasions, to help write RFP which we later responded to (and won, of course).

lukasfischer 5y ago

I had to smile while reading the post as I experienced this many times. It’s a shame. The question remains: How can this be improved? Especially critically when public money is spent on large scale multi million projects. As a citizen, I would like to see a “fair” bidding process where the “best” supplier wins.

morsch 5y ago
A few things lend themselves directly from the article: More expertise on the buyer side overall (less reliance on a vendor to co-author the RFP). Better processes on the buyer side in order to lessen the one-upmanship regarding requirements. Both of these are easier said than done, of course, because if you had the expertise and the processes, why even hire somebody else? In ideal world, the answer is that you could do it, but you chose to spend your resources (your experts' time) somewhere else, e.g. writing more RFPs. Probably not very realistic for most businesses, but on the scale of governments, they really ought to have the necessary in house expertise. (But I'm sure they almost never do, whether it's building a bridge, buying a tank or developing an IT project.)
SkyPuncher 5y ago
Honestly, I don't think it can. Public perception cannot tolerate failure/issues - even if there are huge efficiency gains by not requiring _everything_ to be put through the process.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  RFPs are only one tool in public procurement. Usually you go the RFP route for a novel project that you don’t want to manage. I have too many years of experience in the space. The successful projects are always owned by government managers and RFP or RFQs off of centralized contracts (ie GSA) for specific tasks or people. It is simple. If you can’t manage the project, you probably can’t spec it either. And if you can spec it, only time to market is a ideal reason to RFP.
wodenokoto 5y ago
Sitting on the other end, it can be super frustrating having to go with the lowest bidder, which you very well know aren’t up to the task, but they managed to fill out the bid adequately at the lowest price. From here on it’s a battle to get the spirit of the bid and not some useless interpretation of what you asked for. It’s also a common tactic to seriously underbid and make up for it by overcharging for changes.

atldev 5y ago

So true. I once received an RFP template where our competitor had forgotten to clear their company (and even author) from the document details. I was glad because it helped us avoid a complete waste of time.

jjkaczor 5y ago
So - over the past three years, I had an extremely part-time regional government client who I worked with maybe 40-60hrs per year through a friend's boutique consultancy, mostly as a favor. Last spring, I prepared a migration roadmap, including some initial estimates. Apparently, when they sent out their RFP, they included my name and the majority of my roadmap. My current client (a large, multi-national consultancy) was reviewing to bid - and someone recognized my name and reached out to me internally. We all had a laugh when I explained how tiny the actual project would be - heck, my friend didn't even respond to the RFP as it would be too much headache and not within his niche focus area. (Overall - this article is very accurate in my experience, I have been on both sides of the process, and typically it is a complete waste of time, resources and energy)

edko 5y ago

Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.

victor_e 5y ago
I interviewed at a bank shortly after I graduated college. We had to do an exam as part of the interview process and for that a few candidates were at the office at the same time. I learned that one of the candidates worked there previously and was known to the hiring team. Immediately I knew I wasn't getting that job!
MegaButts 5y ago
> Some companies I'm genuinely asking - are there companies that don't do this? I guess excluding companies with something like <20 people.
- mulmen 5y ago
  Of course there are. If all companies only publish job openings as a charade and know who they want to hire why go through the charade?
  - MegaButts 5y ago
    You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you have a position. The question is if you already know who you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?
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Overtonwindow 5y ago

This happens a lot in government contracting…

saynay 5y ago
I see a lot of Franken-RFPs in government contracting. You get sections that are just word-for-word recreations of a products spec sheet, straight off their website. But different sections are from different, competing, products. So the end RFP is something that no one actually has, and then they are required to award the project to whoever made the lowest bid. 5 years later, when that project inevitably fails, they do it all over again.
p_l 5y ago
F-35B happened essentially to ensure Lockheed-Martin won JSF bid, as far as I know.

jseliger 5y ago

I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and this happens all the time with public agencies: https://seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-associates-never-responds-to-rfpsrfqs-for-grant-writing-services/ https://seliger.com/2009/12/27/why-seliger-associates-never-...

fphhotchips 5y ago
I know that blog post is from 2009, but it has a typo in the title and a typo in the first sentence. I'm not sure it's great content marketing for a company whose primary business is writing.
- aaronchall 5y ago
  In Spanish and Portuguese "espond" means to answer. Perhaps it's a bit of cynical differentiation signalling. If so, you'll certainly never hear their gratitude for pointing out the error so it can be corrected. If not... hey, perhaps you will. Good luck.
ricksunny 5y ago
100%. (Also involved on the proposing / applying side of grant writing here).

_jal 5y ago

When we were starting a consulting company back when, we fell for this once. As the article states, once you're aware that this happens, it usually isn't hard to spot the signs. After that, if we suspected we were being suckered for someone else's process checkbox, we'd offer to write a response at our normal hourly rate, and actually got a taker once. But in general, this stuff will bleed you dry when you're starting out, be careful.

danbmil99 5y ago

So you're saying, there's gambling in Casablanca? Who knew? (your competitor did) I think there is a corollary to "If you don't know who the sucker is -- it's you": "If you didn't have the inside track crafting the RFP to your specs, you won't win the bid."

Kalanos 5y ago

It typically requires a lot of time from your best ppl to respond to RFPs

asyncscrum 5y ago
This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10 account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the presentation layer.

bell-cot 5y ago

Flip-side, an honest & competent purchaser can use "cooked" RFP's to try to weed out incompetent, indifferently-honest, cost-overrun-prone, etc. would-be suppliers, when they're forced to follow a "publish RFP and take bids" rulebook.

orangepurple 5y ago
I don't quite understand
- Upgrayyed_U 5y ago
  Any sales process large enough to require an RFP will attract low-cost bidders who write good proposals but consistently fail to deliver quality work. Writing an RFP that's specific to a single company is one way to avoid dealing with the low-cost bidders.
asyncscrum 5y ago
Yes this is also an additional gotcha that makes this process an even deeper quagmire.

tetha 5y ago

Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Like, we've received the wrong questionaire once. It contained the question what we would do if armed forces intruded into our secured facilities to seize assets. We eventually settled on the answer "Run or hide, while calling the cops". At that point the customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny. In other areas, the consulting teams and us are developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer how nothing is possible due to security policies and compliance and further discussion requires meetings with people with long job titles. And suddenly, deal breakers aren't that important anymore. And sometimes you can even team up with the customers infosec department this way in order to simplify things into a both more secure and easier path. The best way we've found around this is to write white papers for commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It's great for our sales guys to be able to answer common questions with a PDF with a bit of glamour, but with enough incomprehensibility density to look important and to get forwarded to infosec / CISOs. Yes I'm a bit jaded about the process.

spc476 5y ago
You didn't reply with "Witness the firepower of this fully armed and operational sysadmin!"? (ref: https://xkcd.com/705/ https://xkcd.com/705/)
jrumbut 5y ago
People who write those white papers deserve everything good in the world. Being able to answer a whole genre of questions with an email attachment is a wonderful feeling.
na85 5y ago
>Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B. Not just B2B. I've worked the technical requirements side of government military procurement. I routinely had people telling me I was "too junior to be this jaded" and the experience probably prematurely aged me 10 years.
greggsy 5y ago
>”developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer” This is genius and I must know more..

brightball 5y ago

When I didn't realize this was how the process worked, I once spent 2 weeks and about $5k meeting all of the requirements for the RFP including the amount of formally printed copies of the 200 page proposal had to be provided. Had delivered them. I was more than a little bothered afterwards because of the sheer amount of time and money put in. They didn't even bother to give us a courtesy call to let us know we weren't selected. In the end, they ended up hiring a company that was a friend of the head of marketing who delivered something completely different than what they'd asked for in the RFP. Frustrating all around especially because of the number of people that were involved in putting the whole thing together.

brightball 5y ago
Apparently typing this on my phone was a bad idea. Apologies for the multiple typos. facepalm

n_o_u 5y ago

I've experienced this a number of times and it's mostly frustrating. Recently though, we've had two customers come back to us after their "preferred" vendor failed to execute. So even if they have a competitor in mind, it's sometimes good to get in front of them regardless.

rdtwo 5y ago
Did you charge double the initial ask?

mgkimsal 5y ago

I wrote the outline of what became an RFP for a university on site tech training program. Someone else won. At the time, we were about the only people doing this. Certainly the outline referenced things that we'd developed training material for, and we were early in this market. However another company 'won' because they were local, and didn't have to factor in travel costs (we had flights and multiple hotel rooms for a week factored in). The university was 'bound' to go with the lower bid, because they were claiming the 'same' material (which... they couldn't have at the time). Internal trainees reached out later and said it was pretty bad, to the point where they were telling the instructor how to do stuff during the class. But... they got the 'lowest' bid...

drc500free 5y ago

With government contracting, your competitor didn't just write the RFP, they wrote the budget line item that congress approved. You needed to be there 4 years ago when appropriation started.

zerkten 5y ago

You want to avoid RFPs except where you can exploit them. For example, if you are able to get by with smaller customers for a while, you can use the RFP process to gain access to stakeholders and test out ideas. Procurement departments are often keen to encourage more participation to help cover for the fact the decisions have been made, but as long as you aren't taken in, then it's less of a problem. In government and some industries, they may have opportunities for smaller orgs through other entry points, but the main RFP entry point can be easier to work out.

random3 5y ago

:) reminds me of my first company - I was still in college and we bid for selling computers and printers to the national railways company. I negotiated for weeks with IBM and HP. We made our proposal (sealed envelope type). We won. One week later HP faxed the railway company that they retracted our "warranty authorization" (or something like that). We got disqualified. Another blessed HP partner was supposed to win and HP solved the issue. I shut off the company and graduated CS.

fphhotchips 5y ago
I'm sure this was a long time ago, but this is one of those "consult a lawyer" moments to me. Going back and finishing CS was probably the more productive option, however.

indymike 5y ago

I used to have a rule for my sales team: Never respond to an RFP you did not write. Most naive salespeople would complain about it and point out how ethics rules prevented vendors from writing RFPs. I'd then point out the similarities in the RFP to the competitors product descriptions on their websites and documentation.

zamadatix 5y ago
As with most absolutes I'm not sure I could agree with this being a never thing over a "make sure you're really weighing the value of the attempt instead of drinking too much of your own kool-aid" thing. Even if you think it's impossible to sway anyone predisposed to a particular vendor's solution because you can't match the RFP to the word sometimes even just answering the RFP as if it weren't written for a specific vendor can cause the customer to think "Hey, maybe it's worth trying a real RFP next time... or at least reach out to these guys and seeing what they have before I write it" which can be a way better relationship starter than a cold call/email.
- indymike 5y ago
  The only exception I've seen is commodity RFPs. I.e. 100 model aasi392-g widgets. Those are won or lost on price and availability and most companies doing those purchases use reverse auction models anyway...
arrakis2021 5y ago
This is 100% valid. Unless you personally influenced the RFP and have a champion who has told you you’re the preferred vendor, it is a guaranteed waste of time.
mindtricks 5y ago
I'm not sure I 100% agree with the rule, but sales teams should definitely consider it deeply. It's worth the money for a sales team that understands this process. If your team isn't influencing the RFP, that means they have no real relationship with the client and relevant stakeholders. You'll likely just pull in cost-conscious or high-maintenance clients.

dagw 5y ago

Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean you'll always win it. I've been involved in cases where we had pretty much designed and sold in the project and basically wrote the RFP and then some other company came along offered to do it at a significantly lower price.

hpcjoe 5y ago

Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A well known large/prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid. We did. We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP. They never took our bid seriously. Small company with a great rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh reps. Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used another vendor as its stalking horse. We constructed our bid aggressively, and submitted. Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida, the purchasing agent called me up. She wanted me to teach the other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far better performance, etc.) I asked why. She said they liked our solution. They just didn't want to buy from us. We'd won the RFP. But lost the business. Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn't understand why we wouldn't do this for them. I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc. Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for something. I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. Yeah. I've shared some of these anecdotes with others in this industry, and we all nod our heads. All of us have run into this before. Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine. An interesting tangent: I currently work for a company whose RFP we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were too small. That's happened multiple times throughout my career. Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we "lost". Can be disheartening.

mcv 5y ago
> I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no. That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them. Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc. My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it. In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.

Shank 5y ago

> In the case of RFPs, think of it like you’re buying a logo. You want this nice logo on your website, in case studies, in press releases and in CEO powerpoint decks. What is this logo worth to you? This is actually the opposite of true for big companies. Some companies let you use their logo, but most enterprise agreements will prohibit this explicitly. If you see a logo on a website, unless it’s associated with a formal case study or testimonial, it’s probably just an indicator that one person on the domain signed up at one point. If the logo later is removed and replaced with a different company, it’s usually because they’ve signed a contract or been C&D’d and can’t show it anymore.

MauranKilom 5y ago

The article doesn't care to mention what RFP even means. So I'll be the guy in the comments asking: "WTF does RFP stand for?"

toyg 5y ago
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/r/request-for-proposal.as... "A request for proposal (RFP) is a business document that announces a project, describes it, and solicits bids from qualified contractors to complete it." Basically, it's a long laundry list of requirements for things you want to buy (e.g. software), with some vague justification attached. It's a thing in big companies and public institutions, which are supposed to have a high degree of oversight on any move they make. In practice, it's just another source of Bullshit Jobs, since the company publishing an RFP has likely already decided what they are going to buy and just have to go through the motions - a bit like those companies publishing job ads because they have to, when they already know who they are going to hire.
bombcar 5y ago
Request for proposal. Basically a list of requirements for something, and then someone will reply to it with a quote.
rav 5y ago
Apparently, "Request for proposal", which is a private-sector equivalent of a tender process (speaking from my point of view of doing a lot of consulting projects for the public sector). A tender process usually requires the agency to pick the quantitatively best bid (by some predetermined ranking scale, usually price or some price-quality combination), whereas an RFP has no such requirement and just lets the agency pick whatever seems subjectively/qualitatively the best choice.

micheljansen 5y ago

Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor do it for them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but a little bias is almost impossible to avoid.

rootusrootus 5y ago

So how to you get into B2B if the deck is stacked this hard against smaller/newer companies? Hang out a shingle somewhere with a sticker price and refuse to do any RFPs? Schmooze a lot and hope to finally get on the other side of the RFP process?

arrakis2021 5y ago
Bottoms-up product and self-service. PLG companies are eating the B2B pie by subverting these bureaucratic processes. Some of the best SaaS products are unwilling to even speak with you unless you’re already using the product. Sure, this doesn’t solve the big enterprise RFP process - but it makes for a much better pipeline.
djrogers 5y ago
Having been through this several times, you usually start out with a differentiated product, represented by boutique resellers, and pitch/sell to early adopter types. After you've gotten a little bit of runway under you, you can start targeting a broader array of resellers and customers, and grow from there.
- sitkack 5y ago
  This is where OSS can really literally and metaphorically get you in the door. But you will mostly also see occurrences of the big consulting shops using the same software. So it cuts both ways.
Spooky23 5y ago
You look for procurement lobbyists and partners like system integrators and leverage those relationships. Also, you need to figure out if it’s wise. Big companies or government agencies will murder you with insurance and compliance requirements before they give you a nickel.

Andy_G11 5y ago

If the actual bid is not going to go your way no matter what, and if possible, just advertise subsidiary products which might be bolt-ons to other projects that the customer may want. That way, you give the sham process a veneer of respectability (which will no doubt be appreciated by both competitors and customer) and still get to raise the customer's awareness of some things that they might actually want to buy from you.

Mulpze15 5y ago

ROI of RFPs... It is so depressing for me to spend time on an RFP that I won't do it unless I am 100% convinced the RFP was written for me, because I know the account/people. It's not just the time spent on it, it's the feeling of powerlessness and wasting time you could be spending on something much more fulfilling. So much more fun to say "no, I won't bid" after a few emails, with little work behind it.

commandlinefan 5y ago

> We need to integrate with Qlik!! We need a data warehouse! We need to restrict access to the app to certain IP ranges! But the time range and price quote never changes...

stormcode 5y ago

I worked at a digital agency for years. This is the most true thing I've read in ages. Every single point struck a nerve with me. I honestly wish I'd read and believed this before starting my job there. It would have saved me endless hours of stress and pushing back with my leadership about technical requirements that went nowhere.

duxup 5y ago

> Must-have requirements that will never ever be used by anyone Heck sometimes the folks who created the requirement forget they were the one who created the requirement, and certainly forgot why… Or my favorite they requested it, forgot it was their request, and they make a big stink about why it is there. I got that one this week. Fortunately no real consequences aside from me shaking my head with my camera off / off camera. In my experience these situations are as much a company exploring “what do we even do here?” as much as looking at software or services.

ineedasername 5y ago

>These may or may not be actually important requirements for this prospect to be successful This is why most people who've been around even a little while grow to hate sales reps and the sales process in general, especially those large enough for an RFP. This clearly shows a demonstrable tendency towards the mercenary "close the deal no matter what" that is so pervasive. And it is usually very short sighted as well, because this is how you acquire customers that grow to hate you, bad mouth you whenever the opportunity arises, and switches to a competitor when possible, having learned enough about that product ecosystem to hopefully cut through the bullshit the next time around.

antiterra 5y ago

I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system design only for the customer to just hire a generic development contractor to implement it. They thought they got smart by adding a contract to the process that had a six digit contracting fee if the customer went with another vendor. The first big fish was more than happy to pay their consulting fee and then develop everything in house. To them, the fee (which didn’t really cover the opportunity cost or development time) was a pittance.

stainforth 5y ago
I guess increase the fee then?

notyourday 5y ago

We have an official answer of how we respond to RFPs - we send an invoice for "RFP response" * $5,000/h * 10h minimum It is cathartic to hear the freak out on the other side. We also say "No" to "Fill out this questionnaire" or "We need answers to the following questions". You either have a product they want at which point they will figure out how to ignore their rules to get you, or you do not have a product that they want and you are wasting your time doing "enterprise sales"

solarkraft 4y ago
What kind of business is it and how many clients does it lose you?
- notyourday 4y ago
  SaaS. I do not believe it loses us any clients -- responding to RFPs or filling out questionnaires are a waste of our time. If they want us to jump through those hoops they are not our customer. We simply do not give a shit about "their procedure". Our procedure is : credit card gets charged or wire hits our account and you can use our services for 30 days. We bill you on a day 25. If you do not pay by the 1st, your service gets shut off in 1 minute after your "paid for" period is over. We do not restore the service until you pay us. We have gone this way after in a previous company I was involved with found that it is cheaper to sell invoices to factoring companies that take 30-50% than chase checks from companies with signed contracts

kamroot 5y ago

I ran a product management team in a fairly large B2B cloud-software company for one 5 years. Enterprise RFPs are a huge pain. And yes, we could immediately tell when one of the RFPs that we were working on was written by a competitor. We also tried to influence the RFP for a customer. When we gotten fairly large we had a dedicated group of people whose primary responsibility was to respond to RFP from a library of questions.

ArchitectAnon 5y ago

Here’s a what I do in my industry: Architecture. I refuse invitation to tender for services where there are more than 3 bidders. I phone the person managing the tender and ask if they have a preferred Architect already and I say that I don’t mind if they do and I’m happy to provide a tender so they can show they’ve tried to get 3 bids but I would rather not waste a week putting together a proposal and a concept design etc. This works well for me. Open tenders are typically won by firms that specialise in scatter gun bidding and the results will usually be poor quality. A firm with a good design track record doesn’t need to win work this way so they won’t waste time on them.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago
Why do you bother putting in a tender that will have zero chance of being accepted? Even if it's low effort for you?
- TOMDM 5y ago
  I'm not the op, but being on friendly terms with people handling bids, doing small things even like helping them cross of simple policy things like "considering three options" can do wonders for your future bids.
  - rukuu001 5y ago
    Exactly. You want these people to feel a little warm glow when they think of you.
  - hinkley 5y ago
    Also constantly reminding them that you exist and are still in business... I can't imagine you'd put in a bid if you're full up on projects, so you probably have some free time and putting together a proposal, even if it doesn't go anywhere (or perhaps especially if it doesn't) is you practicing your art. You could use the proposal to show off new concepts you are trying to iron out, for instance.
- lmeyerov 5y ago