Your competitor wrote the RFP you're bidding on

Oh RFPs are an everlasting source of fun in B2B.<p>Like, we&#x27;ve received the wrong questionaire once. It contained the question what we would do if armed forces intruded into our secured facilities to seize assets. We eventually settled on the answer &quot;Run or hide, while calling the cops&quot;. At that point the customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny.<p>In other areas, the consulting teams and us are developing some degree of a safe word system. Ask us in operations for something the right way and we can give an annoying answer how nothing is possible due to security policies and compliance and further discussion requires meetings with people with long job titles. And suddenly, deal breakers aren&#x27;t that important anymore. And sometimes you can even team up with the customers infosec department this way in order to simplify things into a both more secure and easier path.<p>The best way we&#x27;ve found around this is to write white papers for commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It&#x27;s great for our sales guys to be able to answer common questions with a PDF with a bit of glamour, but with enough incomprehensibility density to look important and to get forwarded to infosec &#x2F; CISOs. Yes I&#x27;m a bit jaded about the process.

Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A well known large&#x2F;prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid. We did.<p>We found out later that they simply wanted help with the RFP. They never took our bid seriously. Small company with a great rep, they preferred dealing with the large companies with meh reps.<p>Another one ... a university somewhere here in Michigan, an alma mater of mine in fact, did something akin to this, but used another vendor as its stalking horse. We constructed our bid aggressively, and submitted.<p>Later that month, while on vacation with the family in Florida, the purchasing agent called me up. She wanted me to teach the other companies how to do what we did (much higher density, far better performance, etc.) I asked why. She said they liked our solution. They just didn&#x27;t want to buy from us.<p>We&#x27;d won the RFP. But lost the business.<p>Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn&#x27;t understand why we wouldn&#x27;t do this for them.<p>I was then, and still am somewhat, blown away by the complete lack of understanding of how businesses actually work, on the part of the RFP folks, the purchasing agents, etc.<p>Another time, I had a university call us up asking for a bid for something. I asked if they had a preferred vendor (all do). She said yes, but state law said they need at least 3 bids before they can purchase. I asked if our bid would be taken seriously. She said no.<p>Yeah. I&#x27;ve shared some of these anecdotes with others in this industry, and we all nod our heads. All of us have run into this before. Some of the stories are far more outrageous than mine.<p>An interesting tangent: I currently work for a company whose RFP we won ~14 years ago for storage, but was rejected by the person who was my first boss here, as we (the company back then) were too small. That&#x27;s happened multiple times throughout my career. Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we &quot;lost&quot;.<p>Can be disheartening.

Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody&#x27;s time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.

:) reminds me of my first company - I was still in college and we bid for selling computers and printers to the national railways company.<p>I negotiated for weeks with IBM and HP.<p>We made our proposal (sealed envelope type).<p>We won.<p>One week later HP faxed the railway company that they retracted our &quot;warranty authorization&quot; (or something like that).<p>We got disqualified.<p>Another blessed HP partner was supposed to win and HP solved the issue.<p>I shut off the company and graduated CS.

When I didn&#x27;t realize this was how the process worked, I once spent 2 weeks and about $5k meeting all of the requirements for the RFP including the amount of formally printed copies of the 200 page proposal had to be provided.<p>Had delivered them.<p>I was more than a little bothered afterwards because of the sheer amount of time and money put in. They didn&#x27;t even bother to give us a courtesy call to let us know we weren&#x27;t selected.<p>In the end, they ended up hiring a company that was a friend of the head of marketing who delivered something completely different than what they&#x27;d asked for in the RFP. Frustrating all around especially because of the number of people that were involved in putting the whole thing together.

Here’s a what I do in my industry: Architecture. I refuse invitation to tender for services where there are more than 3 bidders. I phone the person managing the tender and ask if they have a preferred Architect already and I say that I don’t mind if they do and I’m happy to provide a tender so they can show they’ve tried to get 3 bids but I would rather not waste a week putting together a proposal and a concept design etc. This works well for me.<p>Open tenders are typically won by firms that specialise in scatter gun bidding and the results will usually be poor quality. A firm with a good design track record doesn’t need to win work this way so they won’t waste time on them.

I used to have a rule for my sales team:<p>Never respond to an RFP you did not write.<p>Most naive salespeople would complain about it and point out how ethics rules prevented vendors from writing RFPs. I&#x27;d then point out the similarities in the RFP to the competitors product descriptions on their websites and documentation.

I wrote the outline of what became an RFP for a university on site tech training program. Someone else won. At the time, we were about the only people doing this. Certainly the outline referenced things that we&#x27;d developed training material for, and we were early in this market. However another company &#x27;won&#x27; because they were local, and didn&#x27;t have to factor in travel costs (we had flights and multiple hotel rooms for a week factored in). The university was &#x27;bound&#x27; to go with the lower bid, because they were claiming the &#x27;same&#x27; material (which... they couldn&#x27;t have at the time). Internal trainees reached out later and said it was pretty bad, to the point where they were telling the instructor how to do stuff during the class. But... they got the &#x27;lowest&#x27; bid...

Truth is, most of corporate directors have their favorite, battle-tested vendors, but are still required, by corporate policy, to go through some formal RFP process which they see as annoyance. That&#x27;s why they go through unofficial channels: my company has been asked, on multiple occasions, to help write RFP which we later responded to (and won, of course).

We have an official answer of how we respond to RFPs - we send an invoice for &quot;RFP response&quot;<p>* $5,000&#x2F;h<p>* 10h minimum<p>It is cathartic to hear the freak out on the other side. We also say &quot;No&quot; to &quot;Fill out this questionnaire&quot; or &quot;We need answers to the following questions&quot;. You either have a product they want at which point they will figure out how to ignore their rules to get you, or you do not have a product that they want and you are wasting your time doing &quot;enterprise sales&quot;

I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some research-based businesses, and this happens all the time with public agencies: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seliger.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;27&#x2F;why-seliger-associates-never-responds-to-rfpsrfqs-for-grant-writing-services&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;seliger.com&#x2F;2009&#x2F;12&#x2F;27&#x2F;why-seliger-associates-never-...</a>

This was a reason I left a job. The company I worked for was focused on government RFPs. During the Obama administration there were promises to support small minority and vet owned businesses. The company was failing to win any contract of substance. So one day we bid on a contract to provide dell servers. Out of desperation, the other members of the team decided to go lower than business could allow.<p>Turns out we finally won something… which we weren’t ‘designed’ to win. Dell came screaming in on the phone asking what the hell we were doing. Dell had written the RFP and ‘partnered’ with a small company to basically win the contract outright. That’s when I learned the system was rigged and it still favored big companies and their selected friends.

Indeed, I used to write specifications about my products and services which could be turned into an RFP and it was interesting to see our own capabilities returned to us in the form of a question. The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix.<p>As for white papers, on the networking and security side, we wrote our white papers with the IT and Security Professional in mind. We were respectful fo their knowledge, vocabulary, and spoke at a high level of complexity; i.e., we didn&#x27;t dumb anything down. The introduction to the paper clearly indicated that we would be using terms and concepts familiar to such professionals and that they were free to contact us with questions.<p>Generally the paper would be handed to someone in their engineering &#x2F; IT department and when the time came, they would agree that having our service on their network was a non-issue.<p>Know your audience and treat them with the respect they&#x27;ve earned and deserve.

I had to smile while reading the post as I experienced this many times. It’s a shame. The question remains: How can this be improved? Especially critically when public money is spent on large scale multi million projects. As a citizen, I would like to see a “fair” bidding process where the “best” supplier wins.

&gt; In the case of RFPs, think of it like you’re buying a logo. You want this nice logo on your website, in case studies, in press releases and in CEO powerpoint decks. What is this logo worth to you?<p>This is actually the opposite of true for big companies. Some companies let you use their logo, but most enterprise agreements will prohibit this explicitly. If you see a logo on a website, unless it’s associated with a formal case study or testimonial, it’s probably just an indicator that one person on the domain signed up at one point. If the logo later is removed and replaced with a different company, it’s usually because they’ve signed a contract or been C&amp;D’d and can’t show it anymore.

So you&#x27;re saying, there&#x27;s gambling in Casablanca? Who knew? (your competitor did)<p>I think there is a corollary to &quot;If you don&#x27;t know who the sucker is -- it&#x27;s you&quot;:<p>&quot;If you didn&#x27;t have the inside track crafting the RFP to your specs, you won&#x27;t win the bid.&quot;

So true. I once received an RFP template where our competitor had forgotten to clear their company (and even author) from the document details. I was glad because it helped us avoid a complete waste of time.

When we were starting a consulting company back when, we fell for this once.<p>As the article states, once you&#x27;re aware that this happens, it usually isn&#x27;t hard to spot the signs. After that, if we suspected we were being suckered for someone else&#x27;s process checkbox, we&#x27;d offer to write a response at our normal hourly rate, and actually got a taker once.<p>But in general, this stuff will bleed you dry when you&#x27;re starting out, be careful.

I ran a product management team in a fairly large B2B cloud-software company for one 5 years. Enterprise RFPs are a huge pain. And yes, we could immediately tell when one of the RFPs that we were working on was written by a competitor. We also tried to influence the RFP for a customer. When we gotten fairly large we had a dedicated group of people whose primary responsibility was to respond to RFP from a library of questions.

You want to avoid RFPs except where you can exploit them. For example, if you are able to get by with smaller customers for a while, you can use the RFP process to gain access to stakeholders and test out ideas.<p>Procurement departments are often keen to encourage more participation to help cover for the fact the decisions have been made, but as long as you aren&#x27;t taken in, then it&#x27;s less of a problem. In government and some industries, they may have opportunities for smaller orgs through other entry points, but the main RFP entry point can be easier to work out.

I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system design only for the customer to just hire a generic development contractor to implement it.<p>They thought they got smart by adding a contract to the process that had a six digit contracting fee if the customer went with another vendor.<p>The first big fish was more than happy to pay their consulting fee and then develop everything in house. To them, the fee (which didn’t really cover the opportunity cost or development time) was a pittance.

Having read and filled out dozens of RFPs I can confirm almost all of them read like this. this is spot on.

Flip-side, an honest &amp; competent purchaser can use &quot;cooked&quot; RFP&#x27;s to try to weed out incompetent, indifferently-honest, cost-overrun-prone, etc. would-be suppliers, when they&#x27;re forced to follow a &quot;publish RFP and take bids&quot; rulebook.

The article doesn&#x27;t care to mention what RFP even means. So I&#x27;ll be the guy in the comments asking: &quot;WTF does RFP stand for?&quot;

I&#x27;ve experienced this a number of times and it&#x27;s mostly frustrating. Recently though, we&#x27;ve had two customers come back to us after their &quot;preferred&quot; vendor failed to execute. So even if they have a competitor in mind, it&#x27;s sometimes good to get in front of them regardless.

&gt;<i>These may or may not be actually important requirements for this prospect to be successful</i><p>This is why most people who&#x27;ve been around even a little while grow to hate sales reps and the sales process in general, especially those large enough for an RFP.<p>This clearly shows a demonstrable tendency towards the mercenary &quot;close the deal no matter what&quot; that is so pervasive. And it is usually very short sighted as well, because this is how you acquire customers that grow to hate you, bad mouth you whenever the opportunity arises, and switches to a competitor when possible, having learned enough about that product ecosystem to hopefully cut through the bullshit the next time around.

So how to you get into B2B if the deck is stacked this hard against smaller&#x2F;newer companies? Hang out a shingle somewhere with a sticker price and refuse to do any RFPs? Schmooze a lot and hope to finally get on the other side of the RFP process?

With government contracting, your competitor didn&#x27;t just write the RFP, they wrote the budget line item that congress approved. You needed to be there 4 years ago when appropriation started.

&gt; Must-have requirements that will never ever be used by anyone<p>Heck sometimes the folks who created the requirement forget they were the one who created the requirement, and certainly forgot why…<p>Or my favorite they requested it, forgot it was their request, and they make a big stink about why it is there.<p>I got that one this week. Fortunately no real consequences aside from me shaking my head with my camera off &#x2F; off camera.<p>In my experience these situations are as much a company exploring “what do we even do here?” as much as looking at software or services.

If the actual bid is not going to go your way no matter what, and if possible, just advertise subsidiary products which might be bolt-ons to other projects that the customer may want. That way, you give the sham process a veneer of respectability (which will no doubt be appreciated by both competitors and customer) and still get to raise the customer&#x27;s awareness of some things that they might actually want to buy from you.

&gt; We need to integrate with Qlik!! We need a data warehouse! We need to restrict access to the app to certain IP ranges!<p>But the time range and price quote never changes...

I worked at a digital agency for years. This is the most true thing I&#x27;ve read in ages. Every single point struck a nerve with me. I honestly wish I&#x27;d read and believed this before starting my job there. It would have saved me endless hours of stress and pushing back with my leadership about technical requirements that went nowhere.

Just because you wrote it, doesn&#x27;t mean you&#x27;ll always win it. I&#x27;ve been involved in cases where we had pretty much designed and sold in the project and basically wrote the RFP and then some other company came along offered to do it at a significantly lower price.

One great manager I worked for taught me to appreciate the time spend &#x2F; wasted by our suppliers so what I effectively was thought was:<p>Send a (light on volume) RFI to the top 10 Pick out minimal 3, maximum 5 and send them a RFP Pick out minimal 2, maximum 3 for a RFQ<p>Every round all the suppliers had a change to ask questions that would be anonymized and answered to all.<p>This way we would protect and honour the resources of all parties involved.<p>Decent write up about RFI RFP RFQ:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cobalt.net&#x2F;rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cobalt.net&#x2F;rfi-rfq-rfp-whats-the-difference&#x2F;</a>

&gt; The thing is, nobody really needs 80% of the shit that&#x27;s in an RFP, and they will never hold you to that<p>They will, they really will, specially if they are government agencies.

As a startup, there are two reasons why you’d ever consider filling out one of these RFPs:<p>1) you can paste bullet points from your pricing page directly into it and you’re not being dishonest by doing so<p>2) you have developed a champion internally (in which case, the bullet points from your pricing page should be pasted into it)<p>If you’re selling into an enterprise and haven’t reached a security or procurement review, but have been asked for a lengthy RFP response, focus team effort elsewhere.

One customer took our RFP to a trade show and walked the booth floor showing it to competitors to see if anybody would beat the price. We knew because they told us.

ROI of RFPs... It is so depressing for me to spend time on an RFP that I won&#x27;t do it unless I am 100% convinced the RFP was written for me, because I know the account&#x2F;people.<p>It&#x27;s not just the time spent on it, it&#x27;s the feeling of powerlessness and wasting time you could be spending on something much more fulfilling.<p>So much more fun to say &quot;no, I won&#x27;t bid&quot; after a few emails, with little work behind it.

This is also the case for most government contracts, including many&#x2F;most NSF funding opportunities: talk to the program manager <i>first</i>; if they are interested they&#x27;ll tell you what they&#x27;d really like to see. Ideally talk to them (months) before the opportunity is issued so it talks about your strengths.

This happens a lot in government contracting…

Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor do it for them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but a little bias is almost impossible to avoid.

It typically requires a lot of time from your best ppl to respond to RFPs