I am in the services business to help people do product development well. RFPs make me crazy because they make it so hard for me to help. They made me feel like I’ve got blinders on and one hand tied behind my back.
When I go through one of these I end up with a massive list of questions. What is the technology stack? What metrics are we trying to drive? What’s the budget? What’s driving this? Who is the customer?… It makes it hard for me to come up with a good answer for you. In non-RFP sales efforts we dive deep in understanding your business and your needs, this information helps us craft the right solution.
RFPs are very limiting, they force us to into a box instead of challenging us to give our best ideas and advice.
You send many hours making the RFP and we spend many hours creating the response. We could save a lot time and money by getting in the same room.
There is got to be a better way to fairly and throughly evaluate vendors and make the right choice.
It starts with conversation. Let’s sit down and talk about your needs, challenges, customers, technology and all the other things we need to know.
Then let’s work problem with you. We can create an approach and do prioritized estimate. We can offer you our best advice, talk about tradeoffs and bring up ideas and challenges you may not have considered.
You can make it fair and manageable for the organization by putting time limits on meetings and keeping the participants the same.
Image: I had free time on my hands, sharpies and index cards