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.
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.
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't want to buy from us.
We'd won the RFP. But lost the business.
Of course, we declined teaching our competitors. They (the university) were unhappy with that, and didn't understand why we wouldn't do this for them.
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.
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.
Yeah. I'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.
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's happened multiple times throughout my career. Even though our solution was demonstrably superior in all technical and financial aspects, we "lost".
Can be disheartening.
I'm sorry to tell you, but I am one of those people who frequently argue against a small less established vendor, at least for anything really important.
Why? I've been burned a few times. New (< 5 years) small companies can disappear overnight. If they don't simply disappear and have a bit of revenue then they often get acquired by one of the big players. Those players either:
1) don't know how to properly manage this new product and it stagnates, the 75% of account managers are fired and support goes to shit. Or:
2) the company has no intention of keeping the product, and despite initial assurances to the contrary a year goes by and I get a notice that they're shifting all customers of the acquired product to their own competing version. Sometimes this comes with a very sneaky hard sell to re-up on a long term contract before the announce the product EOL.
I've worked at startups and and big services companies. At startups, we've gone out of business in the middle of projects, or decided "we don't do that anymore" while we're doing it, and abandoned clients. As the lead of a small provider, I'm always a few screwups away from not being able to make payroll and losing all my staff, and if I'm hit by a bus or have a personal emergency, there is no backup.
At a big company, we had actual continuity plans, a diverse business that was not going to unravel over some minor thing, and thousands of employees that would be able to fill in if needed.
There are lots of exciting reasons to work with startups, or small providers, but there is a reason whi big companies exist and can charge a premium that covers their higher overhead
ohh sure they do not go out of business, but they do other things like killing off products, versions, features, etc... that will burn you
No, the answer to buy vs. build is always to buy if you can -- building is a lot like buying from a startup, which one wouldn't do, only you own the startup and you won't be selling its products. You'll spend a few years looking for a product that exists, has a track record, and can be integrated into your environment with not that much effort. And buzzwords -- the product has to have those in its marketing, because you too have to sell it: internally. Oh, and it has to not be too expensive. I've seen godsends get adopted then dropped and replaced with a hodge-podge of in-house + cloud solutions just because the godsends turned out to cost way too much as deployed. Meanwhile the companies that would exist and have such products for you don't exist because no one wants to buy from startups (because probably fly-by-night), but also the bigger players won't build niche products either. Mostly you'll make do with whatever you have already in place, no matter the suckage. Then some day there will be an open source version of the product you wanted, and you'll still wait a year or three before you decide to use it, and you'll have to put a decent bit of effort into integration and maybe even participation in the upstream community.
This stuff ain't easy. Anything that is infrastructure is just hard to monetize. There's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing going on.
Capital-intensive infrastructure (i.e., tied to hardware) is easier: you up-charge on the HW. Think storage, where you can charge a pretty penny for chassis and drives (SSDs, whatever) and backup solutions, but the real hard and expensive part is in the software (it'd better not fail). It's like paying very little for a printer but being locked into unnaturally expensive ink, except backwards.
Of course, some places do end up doing all the in-house building because they are too dynamic to do anything else and they can't afford to wait. We call these places FAANGs (or is it MAANAs?).
Probably better that way, since the contractor takes all the risks that are associated with smaller orgs. But, you would be surprised how many large contractors are bidding with absolutely no delivery capability. It's routine.
Government software procurement is broken.
Source code escrow is an option, at least for proprietary software products.
The workaround is to sell your stuff through a larger company that's complementary.
Universities are almost a separate reality. Unless you happen to be dealing with someone who has prior experience in the private sector, they will have no idea how businesses operate or how money is earned. It's typical to be dealing with someone who has been doing the same job for 20 years and never worked anywhere else.
A different university had a policy to prefer orders from small businesses for just the same reason. The local suppliers knew that, on any given job, there was about a 10% chance the university would never pay up. They could sue, but a) the legal department had handle thousands of these cases and had gotten pretty good at it, and b) they would be banned from any future bids. One percent of the time, some one would get stiffed twice in a row and go under, but, hey, if you aren’t okay with risk, then maybe the public sector isn’t the place for you.
Anyway, that’s the prevailing attitude that I encountered. They are ACUTELY aware of how money is earned and will do everything in their power to stop you from earning it.
Which isn't too surprising.
He's exclusively been in classrooms since he was 4 years old.
- I try really really hard not to have a preferred vendor. Hilariously, a lot of companies ask me who my preferred vendor is... which makes it rough to do this. I list off a couple companies I've bought from and inevitably they go through one of those.
- The fact that manufacturers give preferred pricing to the first reseller to register the deal with them renders almost all competitive bidding kind of moot at this point for a lot of things. Basically means whoever I reach out to in order to get the ballpark numbers for budget purposes will win.
- Almost every time a third party comes in cheaper, they did something wrong. Literally once had a smaller party come in drastically cheaper than... the manufacturer of the products in question. Obviously, they misread what they were bidding on, it cost them time and money, us time and money, etc.
I never give any of them a discount, in fact I'd love to be able to charge them more because they always require more administrative work. Sometimes I'll offer the end customer a discount to try and route around them.
Recently one reseller became particularly agitated about this. After several emails he asked to speak to my manager (I own the business). The amusing thing was that he had lost the bid. I already had an order from one of his competitors.
I should add that I do have some resellers who actively promote my products, they are worth the effort and a discount.
That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them.
Mind you, fixing that isn't trivial either; the EU has very strict rules on government procurement, where the government organisation has to write down very detailed rules on how the procurement will work and will be evaluated, and then they have to follow those rules. Of course that has lead to companies gaming the bidding system: they design their bid to win, but it exploits all the holes in the rules; either it will be lacking in quality in an area the customer failed to specify, or it will go way over budget and the customer will be responsible for those costs, etc.
My wife has been involved in bids like these where one bid was clearly the best one, but another was technically the winner according to the rules. So they redid the bid and rewrote the rules to better fit what they wanted, but I think that had to go to court. It's a hornet's nest, no matter how you turn it.
In a distant past, I worked for a small web development company with a pretty good open source CMS, and we were hired to do a few government websites. The actual bidder wasn't us; it was one of those big companies that specialised in winning those bids. We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money. It's a weird market.
Whenever taxpayer money changes hands it is very political. You elude to that a little bit in another paragraph, but governments can't just go out and buy things - their decisions will be held responsible politically so everything has do be done by the book. If someone goes off the rails, it potentially represents favoritism and people will protest. I see a lot of this happen in some of the more local politics I am involved in rather than the more routine world of software procurement, but people in my hometown are getting into quite an uproar over the local government trying to give tax incentives to develop an empty lot that costs millions in municipal taxes for yearly upkeep and appraisal.
This presents an inherent conflict of interest, because the RFP process is insane. Therefore there is always a compromise that needs to be made for government workers to investigate and decide on project requirements in a fluid manner, and the need to document those requirements, set them in stone, and allow bidders to respond to them in an impartial way. The compromise is that there is usually an RFI stage where the procurement officers are "gathering information" but that is where they are really deciding what they are going to buy before they formalize the RFP. I think this is fundamentally broken - we need to recognize that procurement involves some deferment to experts who know what they are doing, and we need to trust them to make good decisions about how to do their jobs and get the software they need. But there is still a huge skills gap in a lot of governments over technology expertise, so the more a beaurocracy leans on responses to prescribe solutions, the slower this will be solved.
> We just did all of the actual work. We probably didn't get all of the actual money.
Idk about your personal situation, but a lot of these times when you look at the RFP, there is a usually a clause to provide documentation, and training, and helpdesk support in perpetuity. Consulting and contract work is a field unto itself, and the big players are big precisely because they can organize large multiyear projects that will fulfill these requirements that cannot fail. I help run a partnership program at a software vendor, and we tell the smaller companies the same thing - don't market yourself to the government, market yourself to the consulting companies because that is who will be paying you at the end of the day.
The first time was in 1994 when he applied for an Air Force position in Italy. The role required a max 3 out of 3 score on the DoD Italian proficiency test and some other niche requirements, all of which my dad fulfilled. The Air Force selected my dad for the position since the only other candidate that applied was the person currently holding the position. Then there was a big debacle because the commander over that position actually wanted the extend the guy currently holding the position a few years and decided crafting a niche job spec that seemingly only he could fill was the best way. There was a bunch of back-pedaling and politics and the job position was redacted in order for the commander to keep his guy from being replaced by my dad.
The second time was similar, but at a public university. A super niche job opening for their history department was published on their site that required experience with american military history, and a few other things my dad was uniquely qualified for. He applied, and the job posting was shortly taken down and my dad got a response like "actually we've decided to move a different direction from when we originally posted that job listing. That listing has been removed and we are no longer accepting applications for it". Seemed like another instance where the candidate to-be-hired was pre-determined, but my dad threw a wrench into their plans by applying to a job posting that was only supposed to have 1 candidate (the predetermined hire).
I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his job just to move it along faster.
At my $BIGCORP, if you want to give somebody a band promotion (meaning, up to the next major band), the job must be posted both internally and externally and you must interview any candidates who appear to meet the requirements. It's a pain in the ass, especially when you clearly have someone in mind. There are always people both internal and external looking at our jobs site because we're a well known Fortune 50; you're bound to get applicants to the higher level roles. It just creates extra work and wastes the time of all involved...but alas, regulation.
eta: could also be a requirement of publicly traded companies, though I'm far less sure on this.
There's not really any green card job postings. But getting an H-1B can be the first step toward obtaining a green card (permanent residency) for some immigrants.
And still don't hire anybody who shows up who actually has those qualifications.
I'm genuinely asking - are there companies that don't do this? I guess excluding companies with something like <20 people.
I'm not arguing an absolute, there should be a way for leaders to hand pick the clear favorite when they're qualified, but I don't know if that should be the default policy.
Like, we'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 "Run or hide, while calling the cops". At that point the customer noticed their error and it was pretty funny.
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'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.
The best way we've found around this is to write white papers for commonly asked questions and topics, like storage security. It'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 / CISOs. Yes I'm a bit jaded about the process.
Not just B2B. I've worked the technical requirements side of government military procurement.
I routinely had people telling me I was "too junior to be this jaded" and the experience probably prematurely aged me 10 years.
This is genius and I must know more..
However again, it's hard for a solution consultant or development team directly involved in the project implementation to say no and it always results in discussions that are hard to do, because your only real argument is "I don't want to implement that". And that's when it becomes helpful to refer to us in operations/security as some external authority. Suddenly "I don't want to implement this nonsense" becomes "Sorry, but our plattform operations team is blocking this implementation due to several internal security policies. There is very little I can do, except for trying to setup a call with them, but you know how busy security folks can be".
From here on it’s a battle to get the spirit of the bid and not some useless interpretation of what you asked for.
It’s also a common tactic to seriously underbid and make up for it by overcharging for changes.
> As a citizen, I would like to see a “fair” bidding process where the “best” supplier wins.
Defining what is "best" is of course the biggest challenge. In many jurisdictions, it can deviate from "cheapest wins", but then needs pre-defined criteria for evaluation, and any judgement factor of course can go both ways - it can be used to protect from a costly mistake and to give a benefit to a inferior proposal. But such criteria can at least be used to push it out from cheapest-wins, and make it easier to attack the decision to attempt to compensate for bias.
A big problem IMHO are follow-up RFPs where the initial one didn't ensure their viability. E.g. once a company has won "implement system X", all RFPs that require "integrate with system X" or "maintain system X" are on one hand formally ok because doing so is actually needed, but unfair because if system X is sufficiently proprietary, the first company obviously has a massive advantage.
Both of these are easier said than done, of course, because if you had the expertise and the processes, why even hire somebody else? In ideal world, the answer is that you could do it, but you chose to spend your resources (your experts' time) somewhere else, e.g. writing more RFPs.
Probably not very realistic for most businesses, but on the scale of governments, they really ought to have the necessary in house expertise. (But I'm sure they almost never do, whether it's building a bridge, buying a tank or developing an IT project.)
I have too many years of experience in the space. The successful projects are always owned by government managers and RFP or RFQs off of centralized contracts (ie GSA) for specific tasks or people.
It is simple. If you can’t manage the project, you probably can’t spec it either. And if you can spec it, only time to market is a ideal reason to RFP.
Never respond to an RFP you did not write.
Most naive salespeople would complain about it and point out how ethics rules prevented vendors from writing RFPs. I'd then point out the similarities in the RFP to the competitors product descriptions on their websites and documentation.
It's worth the money for a sales team that understands this process. If your team isn't influencing the RFP, that means they have no real relationship with the client and relevant stakeholders. You'll likely just pull in cost-conscious or high-maintenance clients.
Also, you need to figure out if it’s wise. Big companies or government agencies will murder you with insurance and compliance requirements before they give you a nickel.
PLG companies are eating the B2B pie by subverting these bureaucratic processes. Some of the best SaaS products are unwilling to even speak with you unless you’re already using the product.
Sure, this doesn’t solve the big enterprise RFP process - but it makes for a much better pipeline.
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.
If so, you'll certainly never hear their gratitude for pointing out the error so it can be corrected.
If not... hey, perhaps you will. Good luck.
"A request for proposal (RFP) is a business document that announces a project, describes it, and solicits bids from qualified contractors to complete it."
Basically, it's a long laundry list of requirements for things you want to buy (e.g. software), with some vague justification attached. It's a thing in big companies and public institutions, which are supposed to have a high degree of oversight on any move they make. In practice, it's just another source of Bullshit Jobs, since the company publishing an RFP has likely already decided what they are going to buy and just have to go through the motions - a bit like those companies publishing job ads because they have to, when they already know who they are going to hire.
* $5,000/h
* 10h minimum
It is cathartic to hear the freak out on the other side. We also say "No" to "Fill out this questionnaire" or "We need answers to the following questions". 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 "enterprise sales"
I do not believe it loses us any clients -- responding to RFPs or filling out questionnaires are a waste of our time. If they want us to jump through those hoops they are not our customer.
We simply do not give a shit about "their procedure". Our procedure is : credit card gets charged or wire hits our account and you can use our services for 30 days. We bill you on a day 25. If you do not pay by the 1st, your service gets shut off in 1 minute after your "paid for" period is over. We do not restore the service until you pay us.
We have gone this way after in a previous company I was involved with found that it is cheaper to sell invoices to factoring companies that take 30-50% than chase checks from companies with signed contracts
I negotiated for weeks with IBM and HP.
We made our proposal (sealed envelope type).
We won.
One week later HP faxed the railway company that they retracted our "warranty authorization" (or something like that).
We got disqualified.
Another blessed HP partner was supposed to win and HP solved the issue.
I shut off the company and graduated CS.
Had delivered them.
I was more than a little bothered afterwards because of the sheer amount of time and money put in. They didn't even bother to give us a courtesy call to let us know we weren't selected.
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'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.
facepalm
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'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.
Generally the paper would be handed to someone in their engineering / IT department and when the time came, they would agree that having our service on their network was a non-issue.
Know your audience and treat them with the respect they've earned and deserve.
Has anything negative happened due to that? Were you ever outbidden?
Last spring, I prepared a migration roadmap, including some initial estimates.
Apparently, when they sent out their RFP, they included my name and the majority of my roadmap. My current client (a large, multi-national consultancy) was reviewing to bid - and someone recognized my name and reached out to me internally. We all had a laugh when I explained how tiny the actual project would be - heck, my friend didn't even respond to the RFP as it would be too much headache and not within his niche focus area.
(Overall - this article is very accurate in my experience, I have been on both sides of the process, and typically it is a complete waste of time, resources and energy)
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.
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.
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.
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&D’d and can’t show it anymore.
I think there is a corollary to "If you don't know who the sucker is -- it's you":
"If you didn't have the inside track crafting the RFP to your specs, you won't win the bid."
As the article states, once you're aware that this happens, it usually isn't hard to spot the signs. After that, if we suspected we were being suckered for someone else's process checkbox, we'd offer to write a response at our normal hourly rate, and actually got a taker once.
But in general, this stuff will bleed you dry when you're starting out, be careful.
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't taken in, then it'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.
This is why most people who'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.
This clearly shows a demonstrable tendency towards the mercenary "close the deal no matter what" 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.
Heck sometimes the folks who created the requirement forget they were the one who created the requirement, and certainly forgot why…
Or my favorite they requested it, forgot it was their request, and they make a big stink about why it is there.
I got that one this week. Fortunately no real consequences aside from me shaking my head with my camera off / off camera.
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.
But the time range and price quote never changes...
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
Every round all the suppliers had a change to ask questions that would be anonymized and answered to all.
This way we would protect and honour the resources of all parties involved.
Decent write up about RFI RFP RFQ:
They will, they really will, specially if they are government agencies.
1) you can paste bullet points from your pricing page directly into it and you’re not being dishonest by doing so
2) you have developed a champion internally (in which case, the bullet points from your pricing page should be pasted into it)
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.
It's not just the time spent on it, it's the feeling of powerlessness and wasting time you could be spending on something much more fulfilling.
So much more fun to say "no, I won't bid" after a few emails, with little work behind it.
