This is the Irukandji jellyfish:
This tiny jellyfish of around 2 cm (~ 0.8 inches) in diameter can be found in the ocean near Australia.
The creature looks pretty innocent, but when it stings you, you’re in for a world of hurt.
People who’ve been stung have described the immense pain as ‘having a sense of impending doom’. It’s like having the feeling the world is about to end. I don’t know about you, but that sounds highly unpleasant.
Few poisons can evoke a sense of impending doom in the human body. An example of something that can evoke that same sense of impending doom is nutmeg when you’re highly allergic to nutmeg. Yes, nutmeg, who would’ve known?
I can’t say I’ve ever been stung by the Irukandji jellyfish, but I do know a human poison that brings you close to feeling that sense of impending doom: being asked by Sales to complete a Request For Proposal (RFP).
There’s little worse in the corporate world than having to fill in an RFP. In terms of how time-consuming and useless the result is, very few activities come close.
If you’re reading this and don’t know what an RFP is, consider yourself lucky. It’s an exhaustive document with boring questions where a company asks a vendor to make a proposal for something. And there are often many other vendors competing.
Here’s an simple example of an RFP template to paint a picture if you’ve never seen one:
That’s what an RFP would look like if life were fine and dandy. In reality, multiply these questions by around 1000, then rephrase them in a way that they’re nearly impossible to understand, and find the right mix of obvious questions and tricky ones. Congratulations, now we’ve got a real RFP on our hands.
An RFP is basically a big-ass template you have to fill in for the customer where they ask you a gazillion things about what your product can do and all its characteristics. Most of the answers to the questions in the RFP they can already fill in by reading your website if they weren’t so busy trying to offload this work and responsibility to you.
That’s why I always say, if you hate someone, ask them to complete an RFP. That will make them feel miserable for sure.
I wrote this to absolve myself from my RFP demons and give them a place.
Why are RFPs so useless most of the time?
Let’s dig in.
#1. People Suck At Making RFPs
Have you ever had the displeasing experience of trying to answer three questions in a single Excel cell?
And then, when you do finally come up with that brilliant answer you want to enter in the cell, did you ever discover that the answer is capped to such a low number of characters there is only enough space to answer the first of those three questions they are asking?
And then, while answering the questions of the RFP, did you discover it contains all kinds of rules, e.g., if you forget to answer any single question, then your whole RFP gets excluded from consideration in the RFP process?
Welcome to the beautiful world of RFPs. Yes, I’m confident there’s a special place in hell reserved for the people who come up with these RFPs and all their silly rules.
So why do these RFPs suck so much? There are many reasons for that (list not exhaustive):
It’s difficult to formulate good questions. Anybody who has ever created a survey knows this is a fact. And if you ever followed any courses in survey and questionnaire design, then you know almost all surveys and questionnaires suck. That’s how difficult it is. And I suspect most of the people who create RFPs have never followed any of these courses and are busy winging it.
Most questions are formulated by people who don’t even know what they need from a tool. It seems more like, let’s ask whatever we can and catch all them checkboxes. The more checkboxes, the better. Because that’s the name of the game, getting as many checkboxes ticked. More checkboxes ticked create the appearance of due diligence so that our asses are covered and we’re absolved from any failure if it were to occur.
The checkboxes in an RFP are usually from a feature perspective: what’s your product capable of doing? That’s pretty useless because it doesn’t matter what the product does unless it helps you with what you’re trying to achieve. But we don’t know what the customer who is asking us to fill in the RFP is trying to achieve, so all we can do is tick them damn boxes.
#2. People Suck At Filling in RFPs
When we fill in the RFP, we want to win the deal. We usually don’t know precisely how the customer who has asked for the RFP will use our product because that only gets discussed when we’re beyond the ticking boxes stage. So what happens?
We get an unreliable narrator problem. All answers are filled in such a way to create the impression we’re ticking as many boxes as possible because we don’t know what they really want, and we want to tick all their boxes to win the deal.
It’s not lying per se, but putting your best foot forward to give off a strong impression. You never say you can’t do something in an RFP, even if you can’t, but then you tell them what you can do so they can achieve it another way. Of course, this isn’t always possible, but a lot of wordsmithing happens to leave the best impression and make the customer feel like we’re capable of everything because that salesperson wants to win that deal and cash the fat commission.
#3. Ticked Boxes Are Kinda Meaningless
It doesn’t matter if your product is capable of everything it claims in the RFP if nobody enjoys using it. Suppose all those options are hidden behind a gazillion feature toggles and unusable for the customer. Yet those are the products that score well on RFPs. More features = better, even if nobody likes using them or even uses them at all. We’re scoring our spreadsheet victories, YAY!
And that’s the fundamental problem, selecting products with RFPs is like playing fantasy football and scoring spreadsheet victories. It’s not reality, but you sure look great in the standings. It’s also easy to measure, but that doesn’t make it important.
You can’t reduce how good or bad a product is at its job by plotting it in Excel cells with all the characteristics. What matters is how well it works in your situation.
By now, you should be convinced that RFPs are not the way to go. What should we be doing instead?
Try Out Products To See What Works
The answer is really simple: stop looking for answers to your problems in RFP questions. The questions suck, the narrator is unreliable, and it has little bearing on whether the product will do what you want it to do.
Of course, there are some parts in an RFP that are still useful (like Privacy, Data Governance, Security, Performance etc.), but those answers are much easier to provide.
What’s a much better judge of how well a product will work than staring at ticked boxes? Actually working with the product. Surprise: If it works, it really works. You can’t offload that to an answer in an Excel sheet, despite that it exudes exhaustiveness it absolutely isn’t.
Come up with the most important use-cases, and try to execute those in a few of the products you’re interested in. Spend some weeks on that, instead of wasting all that time on RFPs. Does the product get the job done, and do your people like using it?
Remember, the product that scores best on your RFP could still be the product that every user hates and will never use.
A better world starts now. Let’s stop wasting each other’s time with silly RFPs and only ask questions that truly matter.
The next time you’re considering doing an RFP: don’t do it.
And if you still do it, I hope you will remember some of these points and do a better job at creating the RFP. At the very least, provide the context of what you intend to do with the product, as that’s much more important to provide the right answers than what the product can do.
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.