Like a lot of consulting companies, we respond to RFPs.

We have to; many of our favourite clients are forced to follow stringent procurement procedures. Responding to their RFPs is the only way we can continue to do business with them.

But sometimes we run across RFPs that make us cringe. The potential client wants a detailed budget and timelines, but can only provide the barest details about the project. The very worst of these have a killer clause at the end that says that if you're selected, the RFP response will be treated as a contract.

Last week I found a great post that articulates why RFPs suck:

RFPs are endemic of an oppositional structure that rewards those who fill boxes, but not those who look for deeper awareness or insights that might result in a more effective solution. In our experience, organizations that use the RFP process to purchase creative services often find that their expectations are not met.

As it happens, those compelled to respond to RFPs are often at the bottom of the barrel. Design firms that are in demand typically don’t waste their time with the process.

A much better way to engage a company like ours is to have a conversation. Call us up, talk to us about what you're doing, ask us how we might help. If we can see there's a mutually beneficial project, we'll be happy to talk about budget, resources and timelines.

We've had dozens of these client conversations over the past few years and they always turn out better than an RFP response. Even if we don't end up netting the work, we might be able to give the potential client some advice or point them to another company that can help them. That's not a lost sale, that's good karma.

The folks at Adaptive Path explained the importance of client conversations on their blog last year:

The traditional, one-way RFP process simply doesn’t communicate enough about the project and the company. There needs to be an actual conversation between the client and the potential consultant. I understand why clients think the fair and equal approach is to send out a RFP and insist that all questions are sent via email and responded to en masse. But the truth is clients put themselves at a disadvantage when they do this. A sales process is an opportunity to engage in meaningful and often difficult discussions. We face linguistic, philosophical and tactical hurdles (simply trying to understand what “user experience” means to each company can take a full hour of conversation). But learning about how an organization communicates is an essential aspect of the process, one that should not be given short shift.

I think this captures it well. The client conversation is a critical part of understanding the project and its context. An RFP, no matter how well written, just doesn't do that.

Posted in Opinions on November 22, 2007

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