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“IF YOU KEEP DOING WHAT YOU’VE BEEN DOING, YOU’LL KEEP GETTING WHAT YOU’VE GOT”
Responding to RFPs is a time-consuming process with many natural barriers to achieving quality and efficiency – not the least of which is the typically heavy reliance on subject matter experts (SME) who may not have direct responsibility for RFP completion, nor the sales quota carried by those who do. To be successful in today’s market, companies have to be more flexible than before. Rapid product development cycles and stiff competition force vendors to not only respond as quickly as possible to RFPs but to constantly update and refresh their repository of RFP knowledge. Considering a collection of previous RFP documents to be your RFP knowledge base just doesn’t work. The valuable and difficult responses to significant RFP questions must now be categorized, centralized, stored, and made accessible to everyone involved. Because you are reading this white paper, we may assume you have come to the same conclusion. The goal of this paper is to help you identify some of the key considerations when evaluating and selecting a software solution to improve your RFP quality, effectiveness, and response time.
What To Look For
Your goals and needs are unique. But the following points should help you while you evaluate competing RFP products. Consider each one; decide how significant each is to you; and rate solutions accordingly.
Effectiveness - “DOES IT WORK?”
Forget all the features listed on the solution’s web site. Ignore the lofty benefits touted. The first consideration when evaluating RFP solutions is “does it work?” Before thinking about such things as price, technology, or the solution provider’s history, you must gauge whether or not the solution addresses your real needs. But first you have to understand what your needs are. Do you need help creating a pretty document or do you need help categorizing and retrieving relevant content? Do you need a suite of applications that handles everything from creating PowerPoint decks to writing business proposals? Or do you need a streamlined solution with a laser focus on providing good answers to RFP questions? Once you can clearly state your own goals, you can then evaluate the stated goals of different solutions and how well they map onto your own goals and address your specific needs.
Ease of Use - “WILL THEY USE IT?”
In a nut shell – RFP software has to be easy to use. Too many impressive features can actually lead to a “user acceptance” problem. If your sales and marketing staff are accustomed to complicated software, this may not be a problem. But for most of us, the easier the better – providing it gets the job done. When evaluating RFP software make sure you get all the functionality you require, but try not to acquire gadgetry your users may see as too complicated. Remember – you only get value out of any solution IF your users actually use it.
Ease of Maintenance – “HOW’S YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE I.T. DEPT? “
Total cost of any solution includes its licensing fee plus ongoing maintenance costs. This can include maintenance fees charged by some vendors, and less tangible costs associated with installing and supporting related software and hardware systems. Consider whether any solution you are evaluating will require you to also install/maintain such things as database servers and/or desktop software to access the solution. These are not necessarily bad, but must fit into your ability to take them on. Sometimes this is directly related to the level of access Sales and Marketing has to the technical resources in the IT group. If the availability or accessibility of IT is limited, consider a hosted solution. A hosted solution is one where the database servers, web servers, and application are managed and run by the application service provider (ASP). This typically means nothing to install or maintain by the customer except a web browser. Such systems are designed to handle multiple customers in a “shared” environment without performance or security concerns.
Collaboration and Workflow – “TWO HEADS ARE BETTER THAN ONE”
In many companies there is a gap between the staff responsible for completing an RFP and the SME’s who know the right answers for the RFP's questions. There may be another gap between those two groups and others whose word-smithing skills are more appropriate for inclusion in the official RFP response. For these reasons, you should look for a solution that supports collaborative authoring and approval workflow. Look for software that lets you assign RFP roles on a granular level. Rather than simply dividing all users into Project Managers or Users, a good RFP solution should allow you to assign basic permissions by mixing and matching any/all of the following:
- Author
- Edit
- Assign
- Approve
The main aspect of collaboration is the ability to assign entries to other team members. This allows the owner of an RFP to enter questions and deligate them to another team member or SME to craft the proper response. Then after editing the entry, the assignee can either reassign the entry back to the RFP owner, or can submit it for approval and inclusion in the main repository. This same feature can also work in the opposite direction. As SME’s create new content for newsletters, web sites, support knowledge bases, marketing slicks, etc., they can submit incomplete RFP entries containing what might be good answers to questions that haven’t been asked yet. Such entries can either be assigned directly to an “RFP librarian” for completion, or could simply be submitted for approval. The approver would then complete the entries prior to final approval into the repository. Equally import is the ability to grant separate approval rights to a relative few users. You may want to ensure that new entries have to be approved by a manager or sales engineer for instance. At the same time, you should have the flexibility to make any or all users approvers if it’s appropriate in your circumstances. Once again, simply dividing users into two groups (project owners or administrators and other users) is not sufficient. Your collective corporate knowledge is one of your company’s most valuable assets. An ability to effectively disseminate RFP information allows everyone to improve their own awareness to product features & benefits and company history & culture. Look for a solution that allows you to broadcast new or updated content to users whether they are involved in the current RFP or not. The most efficient mechanism for this sort of information sharing is email.
Proper Treatment of Time-Sensitive Material – “DON’T LET YOUR INFO GET STALE”
One of the biggest shortcomings of many RFP efforts is the inability to easily identify old responses, or responses that may become outdated over time. Even the best RFP response can become stale, making its continued use unproductive. Make sure that your RFP solution records when content is created, approved, and updated. If your RFP knowledge base is product focused, you need to also ensure that your RFP solution allows you to categorize each entry by product and version, and allows you to update the related categorization setup. Another valuable feature to insist on is content expiration. Without it, as your repository grows, the process of periodically reviewing, updating, and re-approving content becomes daunting. Look for the capability to expire entries according to a schedule. Expired entries should be updated and reinstated into the repository. This ensures that your info is kept up to date and that RFP responses based on that info will include the latest versions of your content.
Value – “IS IT WORTH PAYING FOR?”
Value is not based solely on the price tag. If you pay a lot and get a lot, or pay a little and get a little, you may have a fair value. If you pay a lot and get (or use) but little, you have discovered a poor value. Likewise if you pay a little and get a relative lot, you’re on to something good. When assigning a value to an RFP solution, be sure to base it only on the subset of included features that you will actually use. Of the candidates that represent a reasonable value, compare the cost of using each one to the value gained from winning more business based on faster or better RFP responses. This calculation is difficult to quantify, but is related to the following factors:
- How many RFPs you currently respond to in a given time period
- The quality of your current RFP responses
- How many RFPs you anticipate being able to respond to after implementing your solution
- The anticipated quality of RFP responses after implementing your solution
- Your current sales revenue in the given time period
- The anticipated increase in sales revenue as a result of implementing your RFP solution.
Security – “GUARD THE SECRET SAUCE”
Your RFP repository will contain valuable information – to you and your competitors. Make certain that any automated RFP solution respects this fact and treats your information accordingly. Whether accessed through the web or installed in your I.T. department, the security issues are the same. Here are a few points to consider:
- Application Security – The RFP application should be securable with passwords and user accounts with varying levels of permission. Look for a solution that allows you to separate read-only access from edit access and also disables user accounts when it detects attempts to log in without permission.
- Network Security – Look for a solution that offers encryption via SSL. This will protect the data as it flows back and forth between the solution provider’s servers and the user’s web browser.
- Data Security – Make sure that data is not accessible except through the application itself. That is, you should not be able to gain access by simply entering a web URL into a browser without logging on and using the solutions user interface. Also make sure that passwords are hidden while being entered. Having your data housed in a database along with other accounts is permissible if the solution safeguards it adequately and logically segregates it from the data of other customers. If this is the case, ask how segregation is accomplished and feel good about the answer. If the answer doesn’t satisfy you, insist on a dedicated database.
- Audit Trails – The security precautions already mentioned should be enough to safeguard your repository, but insist on good audit trails anyway. Each change to an entry should be logged and reportable.
Support for Channels and Business Partners – “HELP ME HELP YOU”
If you have resellers, referral partners, or other partnership relationships, you may be able to help them sell more of your product or service by granting them access into your RFP knowledge base. The easiest way to do this is by adding user accounts specifically for your partners. You will probably have to pay for the extra licenses, but it’s worth it in the long run. Crafting good responses to RFP questions is hard – your partners will appreciate having this valuable information shared with them. This sort of facilitation is what your channel partners are looking for and may just be what makes them refer business to you rather than to another provider. Having said that, make sure that you retain the ability to shield content from partners at your discretion. You should be able to decide which entries are internal-only and which can be shared.
About the Author
Joe Yeatman is the founder of RFPMonkey.com LLC, a leading provider of hosted RFP automation solutions. The company’s only product – RFPMonkey.com – allows companies whose revenue is closely tied to the number and quality of its RFP responses to win more business by providing better, more timely responses to RFPs. RFPMonkey.com offers a secure solution with an intuitive user interface. RFPMonkey.com is packed with practical features envisioned over a decade of responding to vendor RFPs in the sales departments of several industry-leading companies. For more information about RFPMonkey.com or RFPMonkey.com LLC, please visit www.rfpMonkey.com . 
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