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.
People who write those white papers deserve everything good in the world. Being able to answer a whole genre of questions with an email attachment is a wonderful feeling.
As an example, many customers are asking to connect our SaaS solutions to their internal network via some site2site tunnel, so they can just keep their legacy databases like they are. However, our implementation consultants have tried doing things like this and it's ... not pretty. Like, it's possible, but hard to manage and hard to maintain.
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".
Back when I had my own HPC company, we often consulted on RFP specs for customers building clusters. After a while we started building our own clusters. A well known large/prestigious university on the East Coast US called us to help with the RFP, and bid. We did.
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".
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.
100% agreed. The time to work with startups is to try something cool and new but not business critical.
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
As a consumer, I also no longer use startup products if I can help it. There have been too many occasions where some product I loved got killed because either they went bust or because “we’re so excited to share the news that we got acquired by google (or whoever)! Wow! We promise nothing will change” a year later the product is killed. Sigh.
Oh, definitely. But once you've worked with them, you at least know what you're getting into: A metastable dysfunctional relationship that you'll at least both stick around in, for the good of the kids. (Money is the kids in this bad analogy)
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?).
Thank you - I was getting worried by all the "the real world is a tough place" comments - this brings it firmly back to the real world is populated by fools who don't understand it.
What happens is that when management gets burned by one of startups, big vendors, or internal dev teams, the response tends to be "ok, we're not doing that again!".
It's like all the silly legal disclaimers you see on... docs, email footers, etc. -- these all represent ways in which some lawyer's customers got burned once. You can't win this game. There's no real reason to think that because you got burned by option A once you always will, especially when you can get burned with all options. But we humans don't work that way. Traumatic experiences tend produce lasting negative responses.
There is just no substitute for understanding the technologies and the people involved. The problem with vendors is that they keep you from really knowing what's going on inside them. One problem with internal dev teams is that they can fall apart.
It's all just hard, and management just has to be very good.
Most of the large contractors are turning around and subcontracting to these smaller companies. At least, that has been my experience in government contracts and bids.
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.
One of the contracts in a government group I used to work in was out for re-bid. No one expected anyone but the incumbent to win. When they didn't the new winner had no capability to actually put bodies in seats. They had to push the changeover date back 3 times while the new prime tried to convince all of the existing subs to come over. Their rate structure wasn't as good so they had lots of problems.
One place I worked at did contract with a startup and whose product I was involved in integration, and that vendor later failed. We had a source code escrow clause in the contract. That's a lot like using an open source product whose upstream dies, but you're still using, and now you get to be the upstream if you really want to.
Source code escrow is an option, at least for proprietary software products.
It's so frustrating from the other side. I've lost business to bigger companies because of size. Twenty years later and I am still supporting that software whilst the bigger companies walked away years ago.
Whether it's a big or small company, for anything vital, you will always need assurances for the continuity of the work. Large companies can also go bankrupt or decide this type of work isn't viable for them. What you need, in those cases, is access to everything: the source code, the deployment passwords, everything. Let them be kept in escrow until the vendor becomes unable or unwilling to fulfil their duties.
When faced with such discussions about small companies being higher risk, I'd trot out Sun Microsystems, GM, Chrysler, etc.
There is risk. There is always risk. Risk has little to do with size. It has a great deal to do with management, capital, ability to acquire and keep customers, etc.
As a "startup", we were in business for a decade with revenues of several million per year and growing around 30% YoY, successful/stable products proven in the field in which we were selling them. Dominating in most of the technical and support aspects compared to competitors.
What I found was that the people claiming "too small" were simply conflating larger/well known brand name with reduction of risk. This bias exists throughout this industry, and has for a while. The old "nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM" is a historical example of this.
Yet, when the market feces hit the fan, IBM was infamous for leaving the very markets that they had troubles in.
Google is infamous for its killing off things, effectively at random.
I could go on, but the point is that large well known brand is not synonymous with low risk. Rather the opposite.
But, I'm out of that market and that chapter of my life has been completed. Now that I'm in a small but growing company, it helps that I can see things from this side, in that I still see reluctance to consider worthy technology. Risk aversion takes many forms, and often the decisions made do little to mitigate the risk. Rather, I've seen it concentrate/increase said risk.
Then yours is not a company I would be concerned with. < 5 years and the leadership may still be looking for their lucrative exit. At 10 years I'm convinced that an easy exit isn't the short term goal and the business is somewhere near self-sustaining. I could be wrong, but there's always risk. Recently (well, 3 years ago) my workplace went best bread for a specific need and the vendor was about 6 years old. But in that time they'd grown so much by having an truly fantastic product that I was convinced that even if they were acquired, it would be for the acquiring company to adopt a truly superior product rather than convert customers to their own mediocre offering. Which turned out to be correct: they were acquired, but by a private capital group looking to pump $$$ into them to facilitate more growth & either flip/ipo them. Though to be fair, feature growth had slowed too, but it's also a mature product now so to much growth there would be bloat. Either way, it's an example of a relatively young & small vendor that had the characteristics needed to make me comfortable in their selection.
3) You do in fact get to keep the product you wanted but now a sociopathic sales team tries to get you to pay 3x as much for a long term contract to lock you into it.
The most understandable of all those is the "too small" - once you've been in the business long enough you realize that small companies can disappear quite quickly. Large ones can too, but it's much less common (and if they do go down, you can point to everyone else taken down with them).
The workaround is to sell your stuff through a larger company that's complementary.
On the other hand, if you are a midsize or large business, with minimal effort you can effectively own a vendor that will act as an unofficial extra department. You give them enough business to become their biggest customer and they are effectively hooked for life, because who's ever going to drop a client providing 40-50% of their total revenue?
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.
It’s not necessarily that they don’t understand, but rather that they have very different incentives. I remember talking to one university purchasing agent whose senior manager kept a detailed account of how many of their vendors went bankrupt. If this percentage got too LOW, they were instructed to just stop paying out any purchase orders where the goods had been received. Any vendors upset at providing their services for free could take it up with the legal department. Or go bankrupt. Either way, every dollar unpaid to a vendor was a dollar back in a tax payer’s pocket. Ignoring these bills was a civic duty.
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.
At least in the UK I don't think that attitude would fly given the requirements for timely supply chain payments. They actively encourage SME use in some fields and the ecosystem is richer for it. An attitude like you describe would be seriously damaging.
How on earth does a legal department win cases where they simply do not pay for what they are contractually obligated to pay for? Sounds like a dystopian system.
This is common in healthcare, too. Both sectors then suffer from decision makers being senior academic/medical staff who think very highly of themselves but actually lack any managerial acumen, offering a sterling demonstration of the Peter Principle in action.
I just spent a year at a health tech startup where the primary prospects and customers were tier 1 hospitals.
Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen so much ego paired with such little decision making authority.
Pair that with an incredible lack of communication across each hospital group, jaded IT workers who see innovation as a threat to their jobs, and a sales cycle that can sit around 12 months on average, and voila: I present to you hell on earth.
This is still somehow ignoring how each hospital asks for insane amounts of personal customization on the product, development of features that aren't even on your roadmap, and accounting departments that consistently choose to ignore invoices.
And apart from university folks often not understanding the business side of things, vendors don't understand just how different university business needs are from those of normal companies. Oracle, via PeopleSoft, made this mistake when they first entered higher Ed ERP. They were a disaster on product fit, and in at least one case ended in a lawsuit that involved claims of fraudulent "working" demos of functionality that literally didn't exist.
- 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 often get corporates who won't buy direct, they will put out a request for a quote and I'll get four or five resellers asking for a price on a very specific configuration.
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.
> 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.
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.
> That is just a pointless law, if it requires 3 bids, but you can ignore them.
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.
Some companies even do this for job applications. A manager has a person they want for a role but, because of policy, they must publish it on their employment website, and go through the charade of interviewing candidates, wasting everybody's time. In the end, their preferred candidate wins.
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 applied for a job that a friend of mine was up for simply because they couldn't complete the job search until they had enough candidates. I went through the interview process to speed things up for him. Got interviewed by 9 people when we all knew what the outcome was supposed to be.
I spent most of the time talking about how great he was at his job just to move it along faster.
In my experience, this most frequently occurs if the company does business with the government (fed, state, or local). In such cases, the "charade" is required by Federal or State law. I agree its absolutely ridiculous, but large companies can and are in fact frequently audited on these and other hiring practice requirements (such as interview notes, etc.).
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.
It's not so much an actual regulation, as it is good practice that once you get large enough (ie attractive enough to sue), HR will implement actions to "affirmatively demonstrate" that they are fair in their hiring practices.
Typically, I assume most fuckery is built into a business charter and becomes so ingrained, most employees have no idea why they're jumping through the hoops
Green card job postings do this because it is a requirement to advertise the opening. So you tailor the job description specifically for the person you already employ on a immigrant visa.
You're probably referring to job postings used to justify H-1B (and similar) visa applications. Such visas are only supposed to be approved if the employer shows that no US person can do the job.
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.
Honestly if the job ad surfaces someone who can do the job and doesn't need all that immigration rigamarole I'll take them in a flash. I'll save a ton just in lawyers and time lost.
And isn't that how it's supposed to work: hire local in preference to bringing in someone from outside? I'm an immigrant myself and I still think that's a good idea.
We had this in Australia a few years back. TCS employed a whole call centre to advertise jobs and interview many people for them so they could bring in their own overseas contractors because they could not fill the positions with local developers as they lacked the skills required. All of them.
We have done it at every company I've ever worked for, but not for all positions. Probably less than half on average. But it is somewhat common to find that someone we know and like has become available and we open a position to offer it to them. But HR makes us post it anyway, pro forma.
Yes. In fact, it's probably safe to assume it's happening unless the position being advertised is entry-level or has multiple openings for the same job description.
Every sufficiently large company will have some job postings which are charades, but that doesn't mean that every job posting from a sufficiently large company is a charade.
Getting an H1B worker visa requires the hiring company to advertise the open position and assert that no other candidate met the required qualifications.
You don't necessarily know who you want to hire when you have a position. The question is if you already know who you want to hire, do you always go through the charade?
And the answer is "almost never, unless there are formal requirements for the appearance of a hiring process, which companies will tend not to put in place unless legal/contractual/csr obligations around hiring force them into doing or they really don't trust middle managers' ability to promote". Even a charade of a hiring process costs time and money (and much more so than an RFP process)
Even organisations like universities that have formal requirements to advertise [certain positions] externally will stick to doing the minimum allowable (which might be a poorly written and overly demanding job spec put up on the org's own careers page for the shortest allowable time and any responses binned) if they've actually already made the decision.
Of course there's also a tendency of people to confuse the charade with the more common case of a position being genuinely open and contested and an internal or existing relationship candidate applying (and sometimes but definitely not always being favoured), especially if they just missed out on a job after thinking their final interview went well...
In my experience it's the opposite. I personally know this has happened for probably over 100 positions, and that's not based on rumors but something I witnessed. And I saw that across a half dozen organizations ranging from 100-10,000 employees.
So "almost never" is almost certainly wrong. My sample size is small, but it's big enough that when it happens 100% of the time it suggests it's the norm.
Your assumption that organizations are efficient might be wrong. I'm basing my judgment on observation and you're basing it on theory.
You personally know of over 100 cases where the company didn't have any sort of formal policy obliging it to advertise jobs, but went through a full fake hiring process with multiple candidates it was committed to not hiring just for the fun of it?!
(Your assumption that my understanding of hiring processes is based wholly on theory might be wrong)
By adding that clause to your statement, you're essentially nullifying your argument. "It almost never happens, except when it always happens." So I ignored the latter half because otherwise your statement seems pretty useless. Because then we're ignoring most of the data because...well just because, I guess.
Sure, if we discount all the times it happens by default, maybe your argument makes sense. But that's like saying let's ignore the majority and only focus on the exceptions and extrapolate to make conclusions about the majority.
You're answering a question that nobody asked. And I'm the person that asked the question.
I interviewed at a bank shortly after I graduated college. We had to do an exam as part of the interview process and for that a few candidates were at the office at the same time. I learned that one of the candidates worked there previously and was known to the hiring team. Immediately I knew I wasn't getting that job!
I don't think it's an exclusively bad practice, especially at larger organizations where cliques and silos are deeply entrenched. It can be hard to retain good people when every opportunity is spoken for by the director's buddy and there's no path to move up.
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.
I'm sure this was a long time ago, but this is one of those "consult a lawyer" moments to me. Going back and finishing CS was probably the more productive option, however.
When I didn't realize this was how the process worked, I once spent 2 weeks and about $5k meeting all of the requirements for the RFP including the amount of formally printed copies of the 200 page proposal had to be provided.
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.
Here’s a what I do in my industry: Architecture. I refuse invitation to tender for services where there are more than 3 bidders. I phone the person managing the tender and ask if they have a preferred Architect already and I say that I don’t mind if they do and I’m happy to provide a tender so they can show they’ve tried to get 3 bids but I would rather not waste a week putting together a proposal and a concept design etc. This works well for me.
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.
I'm not the op, but being on friendly terms with people handling bids, doing small things even like helping them cross of simple policy things like "considering three options" can do wonders for your future bids.
Also constantly reminding them that you exist and are still in business...
I can't imagine you'd put in a bid if you're full up on projects, so you probably have some free time and putting together a proposal, even if it doesn't go anywhere (or perhaps especially if it doesn't) is you practicing your art.
You could use the proposal to show off new concepts you are trying to iron out, for instance.
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.
I'm not sure I 100% agree with the rule, but sales teams should definitely consider it deeply.
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.
As with most absolutes I'm not sure I could agree with this being a never thing over a "make sure you're really weighing the value of the attempt instead of drinking too much of your own kool-aid" thing. Even if you think it's impossible to sway anyone predisposed to a particular vendor's solution because you can't match the RFP to the word sometimes even just answering the RFP as if it weren't written for a specific vendor can cause the customer to think "Hey, maybe it's worth trying a real RFP next time... or at least reach out to these guys and seeing what they have before I write it" which can be a way better relationship starter than a cold call/email.
The only exception I've seen is commodity RFPs. I.e. 100 model aasi392-g widgets. Those are won or lost on price and availability and most companies doing those purchases use reverse auction models anyway...
This is 100% valid. Unless you personally influenced the RFP and have a champion who has told you you’re the preferred vendor, it is a guaranteed waste of time.
I wrote the outline of what became an RFP for a university on site tech training program. Someone else won. At the time, we were about the only people doing this. Certainly the outline referenced things that we'd developed training material for, and we were early in this market. However another company 'won' because they were local, and didn't have to factor in travel costs (we had flights and multiple hotel rooms for a week factored in). The university was 'bound' to go with the lower bid, because they were claiming the 'same' material (which... they couldn't have at the time). Internal trainees reached out later and said it was pretty bad, to the point where they were telling the instructor how to do stuff during the class. But... they got the 'lowest' bid...
Truth is, most of corporate directors have their favorite, battle-tested vendors, but are still required, by corporate policy, to go through some formal RFP process which they see as annoyance. That's why they go through unofficial channels: my company has been asked, on multiple occasions, to help write RFP which we later responded to (and won, of course).
We have an official answer of how we respond to RFPs - we send an invoice for "RFP response"
* $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 know that blog post is from 2009, but it has a typo in the title and a typo in the first sentence. I'm not sure it's great content marketing for a company whose primary business is writing.
This was a reason I left a job. The company I worked for was focused on government RFPs. During the Obama administration there were promises to support small minority and vet owned businesses. The company was failing to win any contract of substance. So one day we bid on a contract to provide dell servers. Out of desperation, the other members of the team decided to go lower than business could allow.
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.
Indeed, I used to write specifications about my products and services which could be turned into an RFP and it was interesting to see our own capabilities returned to us in the form of a question. The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix.
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.
> The downside in that small industry was that when a competitor saw a question that aligned with our unique product offering, they knew we were in the mix
Has anything negative happened due to that? Were you ever outbidden?
I had to smile while reading the post as I experienced this many times. It’s a shame. The question remains: How can this be improved? Especially critically when public money is spent on large scale multi million projects. As a citizen, I would like to see a “fair” bidding process where the “best” supplier wins.
Sitting on the other end, it can be super frustrating having to go with the lowest bidder, which you very well know aren’t up to the task, but they managed to fill out the bid adequately at the lowest price.
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.
Public RFPs are at least something you can sue over if your competitor gets too brazen benefits. More transparency into them for the general public would be nice, FOIA (or equivalent) requests help a bitbut then often come to late to intervene, just can bring it to light afterwards.
> 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.
A few things lend themselves directly from the article: More expertise on the buyer side overall (less reliance on a vendor to co-author the RFP). Better processes on the buyer side in order to lessen the one-upmanship regarding requirements.
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.)
Honestly, I don't think it can. Public perception cannot tolerate failure/issues - even if there are huge efficiency gains by not requiring _everything_ to be put through the process.
RFPs are only one tool in public procurement. Usually you go the RFP route for a novel project that you don’t want to manage.
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.
> In the case of RFPs, think of it like you’re buying a logo. You want this nice logo on your website, in case studies, in press releases and in CEO powerpoint decks. What is this logo worth to you?
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.
So true. I once received an RFP template where our competitor had forgotten to clear their company (and even author) from the document details. I was glad because it helped us avoid a complete waste of time.
So - over the past three years, I had an extremely part-time regional government client who I worked with maybe 40-60hrs per year through a friend's boutique consultancy, mostly as a favor.
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)
When we were starting a consulting company back when, we fell for this once.
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.
I ran a product management team in a fairly large B2B cloud-software company for one 5 years. Enterprise RFPs are a huge pain. And yes, we could immediately tell when one of the RFPs that we were working on was written by a competitor. We also tried to influence the RFP for a customer. When we gotten fairly large we had a dedicated group of people whose primary responsibility was to respond to RFP from a library of questions.
You want to avoid RFPs except where you can exploit them. For example, if you are able to get by with smaller customers for a while, you can use the RFP process to gain access to stakeholders and test out ideas.
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.
I worked for a company that was incredibly high touch and kept getting burned by inadvertently giving free consulting on system design only for the customer to just hire a generic development contractor to implement it.
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.
Flip-side, an honest & competent purchaser can use "cooked" RFP's to try to weed out incompetent, indifferently-honest, cost-overrun-prone, etc. would-be suppliers, when they're forced to follow a "publish RFP and take bids" rulebook.
Any sales process large enough to require an RFP will attract low-cost bidders who write good proposals but consistently fail to deliver quality work. Writing an RFP that's specific to a single company is one way to avoid dealing with the low-cost bidders.
Apparently, "Request for proposal", which is a private-sector equivalent of a tender process (speaking from my point of view of doing a lot of consulting projects for the public sector). A tender process usually requires the agency to pick the quantitatively best bid (by some predetermined ranking scale, usually price or some price-quality combination), whereas an RFP has no such requirement and just lets the agency pick whatever seems subjectively/qualitatively the best choice.
"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.
I've experienced this a number of times and it's mostly frustrating. Recently though, we've had two customers come back to us after their "preferred" vendor failed to execute. So even if they have a competitor in mind, it's sometimes good to get in front of them regardless.
>These may or may not be actually important requirements for this prospect to be successful
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.
So how to you get into B2B if the deck is stacked this hard against smaller/newer companies? Hang out a shingle somewhere with a sticker price and refuse to do any RFPs? Schmooze a lot and hope to finally get on the other side of the RFP process?
You look for procurement lobbyists and partners like system integrators and leverage those relationships.
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.
Having been through this several times, you usually start out with a differentiated product, represented by boutique resellers, and pitch/sell to early adopter types. After you've gotten a little bit of runway under you, you can start targeting a broader array of resellers and customers, and grow from there.
This is where OSS can really literally and metaphorically get you in the door. But you will mostly also see occurrences of the big consulting shops using the same software. So it cuts both ways.
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.
With government contracting, your competitor didn't just write the RFP, they wrote the budget line item that congress approved. You needed to be there 4 years ago when appropriation started.
If the actual bid is not going to go your way no matter what, and if possible, just advertise subsidiary products which might be bolt-ons to other projects that the customer may want. That way, you give the sham process a veneer of respectability (which will no doubt be appreciated by both competitors and customer) and still get to raise the customer's awareness of some things that they might actually want to buy from you.
I worked at a digital agency for years. This is the most true thing I've read in ages. Every single point struck a nerve with me. I honestly wish I'd read and believed this before starting my job there. It would have saved me endless hours of stress and pushing back with my leadership about technical requirements that went nowhere.
Just because you wrote it, doesn't mean you'll always win it. I've been involved in cases where we had pretty much designed and sold in the project and basically wrote the RFP and then some other company came along offered to do it at a significantly lower price.
As a startup, there are two reasons why you’d ever consider filling out one of these RFPs:
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.
One customer took our RFP to a trade show and walked the booth floor showing it to competitors to see if anybody would beat the price. We knew because they told us.
ROI of RFPs... It is so depressing for me to spend time on an RFP that I won't do it unless I am 100% convinced the RFP was written for me, because I know the account/people.
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.
This is also the case for most government contracts, including many/most NSF funding opportunities: talk to the program manager first; if they are interested they'll tell you what they'd really like to see. Ideally talk to them (months) before the opportunity is issued so it talks about your strengths.
I see a lot of Franken-RFPs in government contracting. You get sections that are just word-for-word recreations of a products spec sheet, straight off their website. But different sections are from different, competing, products. So the end RFP is something that no one actually has, and then they are required to award the project to whoever made the lowest bid. 5 years later, when that project inevitably fails, they do it all over again.
Ha, most companies have no clue about how to even get started writing an RfP and are more than happy having a friendly vendor do it for them. It’s not necessarily a bad thing but a little bias is almost impossible to avoid.
This is 100% true. The bigger the deal value, the less delegation there is. Often times, if it's like a top 10 account, the CEO shows up and is heavily involved in the presentation layer.
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.