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I came here to post the same thing. I used to be in enterprise software sales and consulting and have been involved for RFIs/RFPs across multiple industries.
by apohn 4y ago
I came here to post the same thing.
I used to be in enterprise software sales and consulting and have been involved for RFIs/RFPs across multiple industries. I don't know a single person who thought the process was sensible or efficient. Unless you have an person whose job is dedicated to responding to the questions, it's basically just a game of passing a hot coal around until you have something you can submit.
- steve_gh 4y agoI work in an engineering consultancy organisation. A lot of the big tenders are incredibly wasteful, with lots of money being wasted on them. We have an aggressive sales pipeline process. We prune our sales pipeline hard, and ensure we are spending money where we can win. Result, we win about 70% of tenders that go to the end - we save money by recognising where we can't win and walking away early. On a related note, we are great fans of the 'pre-proposal'. You should be able to get the gist of any proposal down in 2 sides. That should be enough to get buy in from stakeholders on all sides. Only when everyone agrees on the pre-proposal do you then write the full proposal - so you save effort (and make the client happy because they don't have huge amounts of boilerplate to read!)