Don:

Thanks for the thorough post – in my career of replying to RFPs and helping companies navigate the formal RFP process, these trends are increasingly evident. Companies don't intend to short-change future partners, but so often in an attempt to be timely and put vendors on the defensive, this is exactly what happens.

Your advice should be read (and heeded!) by those stakeholders embarking on the RFP process. I would like to boil down some of these points and incorporate them into the kickoff for the Requirements Gathering stage of the RFP Creation Process...it can’t hurt to repeat this message at the start of each new RFP!

Regards,
Mark Crandall

The worst that happened to me as a vendor was to allocate a team almost 24-hour to meet a customer deadline, and learn a few days after we sent our response that the entire RFP was withdrawn, because of a change in corporate strategy! Tada!

Excellent article - sooo true! I have had the good fortune to have worked on both sides of the fence, ie in IT departments buying lots of software over the years (ERP, CRM...), and now at a software vendor dealing with the realities described in this article. This leads me to the conclusion that it is ignorance about how software vendors operate that leads companies to shoot themselves in the foot by giving vendors between 1 - 3 weeks to respond. I've never ever met a single company that gave more than 4 weeks - and I've been working at a software vendor for 5 years now.

Most companies imagine software vendors to be sufficiently staffed so as to always be able to react at the snap of a finger to any RFP. Any inability to react quickly is perceived as a bad sign ("if they can't be responsive now, then how can we expect them to be responsive once we're a customer..."). Their own IT departments are insufficiently staffed and have backlogs when it comes to their own internal customers, but somehow they think that this is not applicable to software vendors!

And - I'm not even ashamed to admit - before I worked for a software vendor I used to have the very same attitude! Yes, ignorance makes you behave in strange ways.

So dear prospects, I was once in your shoes, so here's the reality: software vendors are in a competitive business and are as insufficiently staffed as your own IT departments. People are working on other opportunities, other RFPs and other customers. In order to reply in the timescales you usually demand means that people have to be pulled off other work (fat chance of that happening) or pieces of the RFP are farmed out to whoever's available, a few hours here a few hours there, plus giving extra work to already overworked consultants. You can imagine the end result, as the article points out - simply a rush job in order to have a chance of bidding. After all, vendors don't usually walk away from business, so they just throw what they can together in the ridiculously short time available, which explains why you have to deal with the quality you usually find in RFPs.

The fault is not the vendors - it's yours! To understand it, simply ask yourself how your IT dept would react if one of your internal customers gave you a massive project request on the scale of an RFP - and then expected you to deliver a quality answer, complete with funding and timing commitments, within a few weeks? Ridiculous, isn't it?

Well, it's the same for the software vendor. Nuff' said...

Btw, I have to remain anonymous here because I work for a software vendor.

Thank you for this eye-opening article and comments from other readers. I am literally getting ready to send an RFP out today. We have spent months gathering requirements and routing the draft version to make sure 'everyone' is on board. Based on this article, I am changing the due date from 3 weeks to 4 weeks and moving the pre-bid conference earlier in the process.

Great subject and recommnedations. My entire IT sales career (with over 18 years at IBM) has been focused on Fortune 1 - The US Government, prince of the RFP process! Compounding the RFP response criteria to the public sector is the Federal acquisition regs (FARS) and numerous additional acts and laws that impact a solution selection criteria. One school of thought has been that a shorter RFP response cycle favors vendors who have invested in relationship, education and business development efforts with the buyer. Maybe so, but that approach sometimes is a tradeoff for the opportunity for other solutions that may be more advantageous to the enterprise. In all cases, small and medium businesses fall short of having the resource and bandwidth to spend on lengthly business development efforts and RFP responses. At Fedsalesconnect, we advise all of our clients who are selling into the Government market: focus focus focus!