Voodoo vs. Veracity
You can hire consultants, download or purchase templates, and drive yourself mad trying to grasp the academic concepts of methodologies like Shipley or Six Sigma project management systems, but you probably won’t attain your end goal: a solid and winning proposal. You want to outsource to a third-party vendor. That vendor wants to win your business; but more crucially, that firm wants to succeed alongside you.
The presence of consultants has become more common in RFP creation, execution, bid vetting, and vendor selection. But consultants are tricky beasts, aren’t they? At one extreme, you have firms that believe consulting is telling you how they will handle your work. And you can bet many of these folks end up selecting their friends as the winning bidders...or worse, other clients who happen to be staffing providers, MSPs, et al. Yeah, a lot of these firms are pay-to-play.
At the other extreme, you’ll find the sycophants -- the hungry yes-men who aren’t doing you any favors with their unwavering assent. If everything you say is correct and perfect and amazing, as these consultants would lead you to believe, why hire them? You already have all the answers.
RFPs must come from the heart. Seriously. They began as formal bidding processes for the government. They haven’t evolved much since then, even though they now occupy a substantial place in commercial staffing industry sales. You're probably not the federal government, so why use the same nightmarish, bureaucratic forms?
