RFPs are supposed to be impartial. That doesn’t mean they are. Have you ever responded to a bizarre, seemingly impossible RFP and had that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” epiphany? Your gut may really be raising the alarm. To be fair, some poorly conceived RFPs result from the inexperience of the procurement groups issuing them. You will encounter, however, what we call “wired bids” -- documents constructed to ensure that a favored bidder, with ties and deep insight to the client, will win. There are times when hiring managers, procurement professionals, and HR leaders have identified preferred vendors but are forced to undertake the RFP process by their superiors. Usually, because the decision makers want to select an outsourcing partner based on merit, experience, past performance, and quality. I tend to agree. Still, professional friendships and allegiances can create complex emotional dilemmas for some people.
If you’re responding to a wired bid, you need to identify the red flags and recommend declining participation in the event. Scoring bids prior to beginning the response process is mission critical, and we’ll explore that topic in future articles. Heck, we’ll even help you score them or provide custom scoring sheets for use in your organization. If you ask nicely.
If you’re the person who just distributed a wired RFP to a pool of vendors you have no intention of considering, shame on you. Without realizing it, you could be causing your company irreparable public relations damage with vendors that may be needed later in life. And industry firms talk a lot. Gossip spreads quickly. Understand that your tactic might not be as stealthy as you think. Last year, I helped a company faced with a blatantly wired bid. All but a single bidder dropped out of the process. And when that procurement person’s superiors demanded to know why all but one staffing provider refused to respond, she was dropped as well.
Following is a brief list of red flags that may indicate wired bids. For proposal teams, pay close attention to these criteria when deliberating on your decision to participate. For offerors, know that a lot of proposal teams will recognize these warning signs. And that could come back to haunt you.
Red Flags
- Overemphasis on the relevance of experience, such as an RFP comprised almost entirely of case studies and responses to abstruse scenarios.
- Emphasis on criteria that are easy to bias.
- Prohibitions against contracting or rehiring incumbent staff.
- Overemphasis on key members of the vendor’s staff, with an unusually large number of questions focused on biographies and resumes, along with atypically high weighting in the evaluation.
- Evaluation practices reaching outside the norm for similar clients. For example, pricing is typically evaluated at 40 percent, but for this RFP it’s around 10 percent.
- Using multiple evaluation criteria to address the same thing. For example, requiring that past performance projects include resumes for the staff being bid when resumes have been requested elsewhere in the RFP. Staff qualifications are now being counted twice, making this particular element disproportionately heavy in the scoring.
- Short, inflexible deadlines. Only a bidder with pre-existing knowledge and intimacy with the client could effectively respond in the timeframe slated.
- Ambiguity that favors an incumbent. For example, requiring a vendor to supply custom software without divulging the parameters and needs to be addressed. Also look for undefined scopes of work and deliverables that are named but not described. Other examples include Statements of Work that require knowledge of the client’s Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), set aside mandates, and processes.
- So much detail, the RFP overwhelms.
- Redundancy -- the same question is asked repeatedly, verbatim.
- Page limitations that make it impossible to respond to all requirements. Only a preferred bidder could know what to focus on and what to skip without being branded noncompliant.
- Fixed price proposals that provide insufficient information about program spend, volumes, the time needed to implement, etc.
- Unusually brief responses to bidder questions, especially when only a handful of vendors have been invited to the RFP.
- No responses to bidder questions that offerors could easily have answered.
- Unusually lengthy answers to bidder questions delivered past the promised date, without an extension to the RFP.
- “Processes” specified in the RFP that can’t be mapped or charted -- only a vendor with insight and experience could figure them out.
2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
