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.
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...
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.