Score RFPs Before Submitting Your Intent to Respond

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.

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Wired Bids and Red Flags

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.

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Answer Direct Questions Directly

If you’re a proposal writer responding to an RFP, here is a surefire way to ruin what might have been a decent proposal: never, and I mean never, answer a direct question directly. When used properly, an RFP provokes thought, careful planning, innovation, and a solid basis for further discovery. Unfortunately, proposals are also driven by long and meticulous narrative. The offeror wants a thorough response, but brevity remains tantamount to success.

If you can’t focus on core points and deliver as concise an answer as possible, you’ll lose the attention (and interest) of the evaluation team. To avoid screwing up a proposal, don’t pack meaningless marketing fluff and filler content into your answers. Don’t talk in circles that never actually answer the question. This is the most efficient and straightforward path to failure. This practice may also create the perception in the offeror’s mind that you can’t provide the services requested or are lying.

Here are two recurring examples.

Scenario 1
Question: List the criteria used to evaluate the performance/success of your teams.

The Perfect Wrong Answer: Although program and team member performance is effectively determined by agreed upon service levels, metrics, and other key performance indicators (KPIs), teams are ultimately measured by client satisfaction.

This is the perfect non-answer. What does it mean? It never specifically addresses the question, nor does it provide even a brief, clean list of bullet points to highlight the usual metrics one would expect. It also implies you have no interest in or tools with which to measure your resources. You’ve just placed the onus on the client when the whole point of outsourcing is to ease those burdens. And nothing says “our company has never really done this before and has no idea what you expect from us” better than this response.

Scenario 2
Question: Client requires strategic business reviews quarterly. Do you agree to these terms (Y/N).

The Perfect Wrong Answer: Anything other than “Yes” or “No.”

The quarterly review is a client requirement. Will you comply? Yes or No? There’s nothing more to say. If offerors want details on the structure, content, and topics covered during these reviews, they’ll ask separately-- probably in the next question. If not, don’t presume.

Should you encounter any ambiguities or confusion with questions in the RFP, it’s your responsibility as the proposal professional to address and resolve them during the Question and Answer period.

2014. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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