I have received a plight decline for a proposal I have never sent
Today I have received a plight decline for a proposal I have never sent, I will include an extract of an e-mail correspondence at the end.
Responding RFPs is a futile exercise for a company like ours. People who send them are not interested in you as a company, they are interested in “getting quotes from 5 web development companies”.
Web analytics clearly shows that - they spend 20 seconds on the home page and jump to a feedback form.
In most of the cases the winner is already known and they go through the motion of their “process” wasting 100s of hours of potential suppliers hungry for work…
Even if a tender is half-genuine they are bound select a company with best sales force or who guest their budget right… or anyone but the most suitable suppler.
To select the most suitable supplier they have to do their home work, they have to research, but they won’t. Why should they? Everybody should sing and dance for free for them lured by chunk of money (“if the project is won”).
To weed out above mentioned requests we have made our enquiry form intentionally laborious, and added a questionnaire. Contrary to what we’ve been advised, 100% of valid leads fill in this lengthy questionnaire.
So one day we’ve received a document for an estimate.
Of course it is  easy to read 100page + technical document and give a precise figure: 145 986 pounds Sir! and we should do it for free!
I have replied back with a short note, thrown a speculative figure and asked a simple question:
“Can you let me know how you found Magic Web Solution, and what prompted you to contact us?”
No reply for my question, of course, but this is what we’ve received months later:
“excuse me if i reply you only now. I would like to tell you that I was pleased to receive, examine your proposal and I thank you for your time, effort and interest on our grants web project. I regret, however, that we are unable to accept your proposal. Although I find your proposal to be very interesting and competitive we opted for including the web application development in a wider project of restructuring the grants process that, in this phase, requires a directly connected work with _organisation_name_.
However, I would be pleased to consider your services in the possibility of further projects.
Thanks again for your proposal. I do appreciate your time and effort and wish you the best in the future.”
More or less the same result as in case where we  would spend days examining the document, drafting project plan and estimate, and going through several iterations of free consultancy…
The first rule of b2b selling
If it gets to the RFP stage, you lost.
Great business to business marketers (and profitable ones) make the sale long before that happens.
The RFP is an organizational punt, it’s a way of saying, “it’s all a commodity, we can’t decide, cheap guy wins.”
The cheap guy, of course, never wins.
