It’s that time of year again: time for the RFPs.

Every time June rolls around it seems as though the website project that’s been shelved comes around again for its due and to sum up the hopes and dreams of said project, we receive an RFP.

Let me share with you the sad truths about RFPs and why we reject 90% of the ones we get: a good vendor can tell a bad RFP within about three pages.  You may think, “But we worked so hard on it, why won’t you respond?” or conversely, “If you don’t want our money, fine!”

But if your RFP process is limited to your internal team — the very team who hasn’t supported getting this project out the door sooner — you might be having the wrong conversation.  Good vendors can bring innovation when they are allowed to, but in an attempt to reduce the risk, RFPs result in the lowest common denominator: making everyone happy.

There are three kinds of really bad RFPs, which I’d suggest you avoid:

1. The Kitchen Sink RFP whereby a hospital gets together and makes an unprioritized wish list of “stuff” they wish they had and seeks a “ballpark” quote.

The underlying theory: if we put it all down, we can see what we can get in under budget.

How to recognize one: you make a bulleted or numbered list of 20+ items.

The results: all you’ll get back are half-truths of “sure, we can do that.”   Why?  Well, you’re not being fully honest.  Some goals are more important than others, such as building a site to address your strategic business needs.  Other items, like a gift shop for your volunteers, are “nice to haves.”  If you count them equally, you can’t communicate your needs effectively, and your organization isn’t willing to “disappoint” people at the beginning of the process.  In other words, you’re counting on a vendor to come in and take the heat.   Does that sound like a project you’d want?

2. The Consultant RFP whereby a hospital hires a consultant to help them build the point-by-point items that are most important to them and susses out functionality before cost.

The underlying theory: a consultant will help us stay focused, provide us an industry-standard RFP template, and manage the vendor responses so we don’t have to.

How to recognize one: your pocketbook feels lighter after every conversation.

The results: you’ll get back responses which conform to the consultant’s own opinions of how things should be done and then, once you pick a vendor, the consultant leaves.  It’s an arranged marriage of sorts.  Except that instead of spending quality time with the vendor, you spend all that time with a consultant… who then leaves.   The problem for a vendor in this relationship is that we’re never sure if the consultant is speaking for themselves or for the client.  And, we note, many consultants mysteriously end up recommending the same vendors.

3. The Checkbox RFP whereby all features and requirements for the project are reduced to Yes/No questions and then priority ranked, ordered, sorted, and priced.

The underlying theory: Excel can make our decisions for us.

How to recognize one: it’s unreadable to human beings and is often over 1″ thick when printed.

The results: you will get back shockingly few respondents and even though you went through all the trouble, you will end up with canned results nonetheless.  Then your point Excel genius who spent his or her blood, sweat, and tears to get it done will go crazy.  And you’ll pick the vendor who got within a mile of filling out the paperwork properly, which often is the one who is most desperate for your business… because they had the time to put into filling out this immense paperwork.  Not a recipe for success!

Look, there’s about three companies in the United States who are qualified to do this work at all and another four or five who have some overlapping experience in the market.   The main reason you don’t need an RFP is that the world of folks willing to provide services to healthcare is incredibly small.  (And the world of talented folks is even smaller…)

Here’s the fastest way to get a good response: email all your potential vendors with a budget and ask, “what could I get for $x by such-and-such a date?”

You could spend a single day hearing 1 hour pitches from everyone, cut your list to three, and then invite out your finalists, whilst chatting up their references.   Your success, in any multi-disciplinary web projects, is not going to rest on features but on selecting a partner you can trust will deliver.

Bad RFPs scare away good vendors.  The point of an RFP is to de-personalize a purchasing experience but with a web project, you need a partner, not a dealer.

Relationships are not commodities; if they were, marketing people would all be out of jobs!