One thing that never fails to impress me is how polished some salespeople are when it comes to the RFP/RFQ/RFI process.
They are very good at steering the buyer to weight certain features heavily and to discount other features entirely in the pre-RFP phase. This is, of course, “shaping” the RFP.
They are very good at writing slick proposals. These make the buyer feel good about the purchase.
They succeed at making the buyer feel good about themselves.
Note that none of what I have described has anything to do with the buyer purchasing the item with the best problem-solution fit or at a reasonable price. Value-for-money is not part of this conversation.
The salesperson’s job is not to solve your problem; it’s to convince you to buy their stuff.
It comes down to getting the buyer to think it was their idea to buy the widget that the polished salesperson is peddling.
Salespeople who are good at responding to bid solicitations are really like jedi knights.
Those aren’t the droids you are looking for; mine are.
Let’s conduct a thought experiment. Consider the following scenario.
Imagine a buyer who does their independent research. They don’t hire a consultant. They think about things from first principles. They develop their own expertise by speaking to their internal customers, the people who will use the good or the service the organization proposes to buy. They focus on what’s important and what’s not. Perhaps they talk to people with the same needs in other organizations to understand how they would approach the problem with a clean sheet of paper.
People can be remarkably candid and helpful if you know how to ask the right questions and you have the courage to do so.
Our intrepid and self-directed buyer team puts together a description of the thing that they believe will most closely address the problem their purchase is meant to resolve.
They do all of this without looking at what’s available in the marketplace and without speaking to any supplier. They don’t want to be infected. They want to approach this situation with a beginner’s mind, free of assumptions and history.
Inevitably, this pleasant reverie will collide with market reality.
At some point, our buyer team must speak with the suppliers. Perhaps it’s a pre-RFP conference call to talk about what they want.
Imagine the fireworks.
Invariably, the buyer will describe something that is innovative or that challenges the status quo approach to this particular problem.
Cue the wailing.
What you’re talking about doesn’t exist, the consultants will say. What you’re asking for will require millions of dollars in development spend, the leading incumbents will say. (This is especially true for SaaS software.) I’ve seen situations in which all of the participants on the call take turns laying into the buyer, gently. It’s a delicate balance. They have to get the buyer team to second guess their internally developed understanding of the problem and what’s feasible, but without individually being the bad guy who makes the buyer upset. It’s amazing how organic this shared responsibility diffuses; every supplier seems to do their part in negging the buyer. It’s tacitly collusive.
If they get this right, one lucky supplier will get the opportunity to educate the buyer on the realities of the marketplace for these type of solutions in a follow-up “consultative” session. If, coincidentally, the emergent understanding happens to align with the individual vendor’s product line, then so be it.
But it’s even worse than that.
Our buyer team, having been scolded into timidity, will write an RFP that now caters obviously to one particular supplier. Perhaps they understand this, so the buyer (sheepishly) waits to release the RFP until the Friday before the July 4th long weekend at 5 pm, the netherworld for buried press releases and bid solicitations.
Anyone sophisticated reads the RFP and realizes that this deal is “wired” for a particular supplier. Unless they feel obligated by the relationship to write a proposal, suppliers drop out. A competitive auction becomes a failed auction quickly. The buyer scrambles to find respondents. An auction with three proposals is still an auction, right?
Even when the buyer does manage to convince several suppliers to respond, potentially by cajoling them with promises of a fair fight or better access on the next one, the default tendency for the committees that vet the final submissions is to lean towards the slick proposal. You know them: the ones with the great graphics and the jargon and the case studies. If there is an oral presentation, these people deliver beautifully.
Here’s the secret that nobody tells you: there is no correlation between proposal quality and ultimate value-for-money.
The better way to do this is, ironically, simpler.
First, the buyer should describe the outcome they want to obtain. If your problem is that you need to figure out how to handle snow clearance now that your current municipal fleet of snow trucks is getting older, then the outcome might be saying the City of Rimouski is interested in having clear streets within six hours of any snowstorm that deposits more than 2 cm of snow in a three-hour period. This would include a description of the constraints particular to Rimouski in the wintertime. This contrasts with the conventional response: issuing an RFP for snow trucks with an overly prescriptive explanation of what the trucks should look like.
Second, instead of being swayed by a glossy proposal, do real reference checks and speak with as many people as possible to understand the actual performance of different suppliers under real-world conditions. If you had to do it all over again, would you still select vendor A?
Very few people check references properly. They may ask the suppliers for the names of some referees, but these are cherry-picked for positive reviews. If you’re interviewing someone for a job, would you rather speak with their best friend or someone who was on the other side of a deal table from them? It’s difficult to find the right people, but it’s not impossible. Even then, you have to know the right questions to ask. Nobody is going to tell you outright that company XYZ is terrible. People are nice. People are afraid of litigation. Buyers need to be able to ask questions in such a way that their interviewees reveal their true preferences. This is an artform.
If the buyer can get this right, they obtain value-for-money nirvana.
You need the right tools, though.
This is what we have built at EdgeworthBox: a flexible RFP platform that enables outcome-oriented sourcing and real communication (not stilted pro forma FAQs) using our built-in messaging functionality. We can facilitate sophisticated vendor reference checks, too. We would love to hear from you. Please reach out.
