In most cases, there is already a preferred vendor and the RFP is tailored to suit that vendor well. That means the work is mostly meaningless because someone else will win the contract anyway.
Thankfully, it's been a long time that I had to fill out such an RFP...
5-10 years ago when at PwC, there were two kinds of directors: directors who won follow-on work from their clients without RFPs, and directors who were made to compete in RFP processes.
I fell into the middle: it was usually follow-on work, but because it was usually in the >$500k range, banks were forced to issue RFPs and go through a (fair) selection process. Sometimes this could be avoided by trimming down the contract scope, but not always.
I’ve seen some big ones in the banking world: Citibank, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, Barclays… sometimes they’re a dozen pages long, sometimes they’re just half a page. Sometimes there’s half a dozen questionnaires in badly formatted spreadsheets, sometimes there’s no templates.
It’s rough. And yes, if you’re SaaS, it’s much easier to try a product and see, but if you’re a services firm - you have no recourse.
Thanks for your response, and you're right, I should have stated clearly that my experience with RFPs comes mostly from working at SaaS companies, I know that makes this perspective way limited :).
I'm curious, let's say you'd be on the other side and wanted to hire a services firm, what would you do instead of a RFP?
To the extent that your message is to "try and see rather than ask a 100 theoretical questions", I think it is still somewhat relevant to services firms. As I mentioned - in the majority of the cases, these are on-sell opportunities.
Not having recourse means that you are not able to offer a service that exactly depicts the current need stated in the RFP - you may have offered other related services in the near past that qualify as a "trial" to see the quality of the work.
If I was a big enterprise and I had to hire a services firm, I would do RFPs but do them differently: more similar to hiring a team member.
1) the questions in the RFP would be a lot more limited (or not exist at all), but rather focus on what service looking for (like a JD)
2) I would let the candidate firms pitch for why they think they're the best in general, and why they're suited for the specific ask
3) I would interview the top 3-5 candidate firms
4) Maybe do a hackathon or a short time-boxed assignment to see the quality of the work if I haven't already seen their quality on a past assignment. Maybe the assignment is paid.
5) Focus more on quality than boiling it down to the lowest offer
This stands true also for SaaS to an extent. I can see why RFPs exist - they're just done all wrong.
Free trials I've given to large enterprises while at a B2B SaaS company were difficult because if they're doing 3 of them - they're not always able to find the differentiators, and sometimes it boils down to something that's not a feature in the product at all, but perhaps it is the fact that they are GDPR compliant or not, or whether they have good customer service or not, or whether they might last in the market for more than 5 years or not.
It's also possible that I have things on my roadmap that you want - and you will get in a few months or a year and that is ok for your needs. So, an opportunity to pitch my product as part of an RFP was meaningful - just that the RFP process itself incredibly badly designed.
In most cases, there is already a preferred vendor and the RFP is tailored to suit that vendor well. That means the work is mostly meaningless because someone else will win the contract anyway.
Thankfully, it's been a long time that I had to fill out such an RFP...
Yep, the main job is then to create a paper trail that backs up the choice that was already made.
Oh man. This brought back a lot of PTSD.
5-10 years ago when at PwC, there were two kinds of directors: directors who won follow-on work from their clients without RFPs, and directors who were made to compete in RFP processes.
I fell into the middle: it was usually follow-on work, but because it was usually in the >$500k range, banks were forced to issue RFPs and go through a (fair) selection process. Sometimes this could be avoided by trimming down the contract scope, but not always.
I’ve seen some big ones in the banking world: Citibank, Morgan Stanley, MUFG, Barclays… sometimes they’re a dozen pages long, sometimes they’re just half a page. Sometimes there’s half a dozen questionnaires in badly formatted spreadsheets, sometimes there’s no templates.
It’s rough. And yes, if you’re SaaS, it’s much easier to try a product and see, but if you’re a services firm - you have no recourse.
Thanks for your response, and you're right, I should have stated clearly that my experience with RFPs comes mostly from working at SaaS companies, I know that makes this perspective way limited :).
I'm curious, let's say you'd be on the other side and wanted to hire a services firm, what would you do instead of a RFP?
To the extent that your message is to "try and see rather than ask a 100 theoretical questions", I think it is still somewhat relevant to services firms. As I mentioned - in the majority of the cases, these are on-sell opportunities.
Not having recourse means that you are not able to offer a service that exactly depicts the current need stated in the RFP - you may have offered other related services in the near past that qualify as a "trial" to see the quality of the work.
If I was a big enterprise and I had to hire a services firm, I would do RFPs but do them differently: more similar to hiring a team member.
1) the questions in the RFP would be a lot more limited (or not exist at all), but rather focus on what service looking for (like a JD)
2) I would let the candidate firms pitch for why they think they're the best in general, and why they're suited for the specific ask
3) I would interview the top 3-5 candidate firms
4) Maybe do a hackathon or a short time-boxed assignment to see the quality of the work if I haven't already seen their quality on a past assignment. Maybe the assignment is paid.
5) Focus more on quality than boiling it down to the lowest offer
This stands true also for SaaS to an extent. I can see why RFPs exist - they're just done all wrong.
Free trials I've given to large enterprises while at a B2B SaaS company were difficult because if they're doing 3 of them - they're not always able to find the differentiators, and sometimes it boils down to something that's not a feature in the product at all, but perhaps it is the fact that they are GDPR compliant or not, or whether they have good customer service or not, or whether they might last in the market for more than 5 years or not.
It's also possible that I have things on my roadmap that you want - and you will get in a few months or a year and that is ok for your needs. So, an opportunity to pitch my product as part of an RFP was meaningful - just that the RFP process itself incredibly badly designed.