We’ve already discussed whether clients should bother issuing RFPs, but today we’re focusing on whether vendors should bother to bid. More often than not, the right answer is to politely decline. There exist plenty of vendor companies dominated by salespeople who are inextricably married to, even enamored of, RFPs. We encountered one organization whose senior leaders openly boasted, “We never met an RFP we didn’t like.” That attitude led to abysmal results, wasted time, and squandered opportunities. By bidding on any RFP distributed, regardless of feasibility or strategic alignment, the higher value bids often wither and die in the chaos of the unprioritized traffic. With this degree of dilution, every bid becomes a loser.
Before you fire off an executed Intent to Respond, score the offer. If you don’t have an existing relationship with a prospect, you can bet the RFP process has not been undertaken to seek new ideas or innovations; it’s there to determine reasons for rejecting you. Before you spend all that time, effort, and money preparing an onerous proposal response, with the odds stacked against you, score the bid and disqualify yourself if need be.
We have created countless scoring sheets, filled with lots of numbers and percentages and lengthy formulas. They’re effective but complicated. Depending on the RFPs your firm typically receives, a simple, direct, common sense approach might do the trick. So feel free to download our no-nonsense scoring sheet in the Resources section. Or go directly to the RFx Scoring Sheet. After accessing the spreadsheet, select File > Download As > and choose XLSX for Excel. If you’d prefer your own copy in the native Google Docs format, request it using the Contact form. Don’t worry, it doesn’t cost anything.
If you’d like us to design a custom calculator for your business, one with all those fancy equations and moving parts, we’d be happy to oblige.
2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
