Pelz-Sharpe Alan Pelz-Sharpe

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Vendor Tip: perform some basic research before disqualifying prospects

3-Feb-2010

Tags: Component Content Management, Digital and Media Asset Management, Document Management (ECM), E-mail Archiving and Management, Enterprise Collaboration & Social Software, Enterprise Search, Evaluating SharePoint, Portals and Content Integration, Web Analytics, Web Content Management, Selecting Technology

Our job here is to advise buyers of technology, never vendors.  But today I am going to make an exception and give the vendors out there a solid tip. 

Do your homework before responding to RFPs.

Now that we have search tools like Bing and Google, ten minutes desk research can return a lot of information.  If you receive an RFI or RFP from a firm you have not previously worked with, then it makes good sense to check them out and get a feel for their structure, size, and potential long-term needs.

I only mention this as recently one of our clients received a (belated) response to an RFP from a very well known vendor, one that essentially whined about the thoroughness of the buyer's procurement process, and (not very subtly) implied the buyer could not really afford their products anyway.

In fact the buyer is a sophisticated organization with advanced requirements, one that can more than afford the product. On paper at least, that vendor offered an excellent fit. Rather than asking the buyer to justify themselves, a quick bit of desk research to qualify them would have done the job. But one lazy and somewhat insulting e-mail later, this particular vendor now likely lost all hope of landing what could have been a very nice deal indeed.

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