centre{source}

An open letter from Kurt and Evan:

It’s no secret that every agency agrees – RFP’s (request for proposals) are notoriously unhelpful, inaccurate and time wasting. However, this methodology continues to be the predominate leader in bid acquisition. Over the past several years, CentreSource had hoped that a new method would have surfaced … but no luck yet.

Thus as way of self expression and therapeutic healing, we have outlined the top 10 questions that must go through the mind of the person creating an RFP.

1. Is the vendor a family member or close friend – if not, throw away their response.
2. Did they guess right on the budget? (our budget is listed as $50K, we want the bid to be $31K) In other words was it closest to $1 without going over the second lowest bid?
3. As we sent out a nation wide request, are they a local firm. If not, throw away their response.
4. Did they in fact manage to kill 12 trees and effectively raise HP’s stock due to paper and ink usage? If not, throw away their response.
5. Even though we anticipate this being a very large initiative, did we manage to reduce scope to 11 bullet points? Isn’t that enough? Of course it is.
6. During the presentation can we make sure that all of our decision makers are not present? Surely they won’t need to have any future input.
7. Did the sales representative providing a bid check into a clinic due to exhaustion or emotional distress? If not, throw away their response.
8. Will the RFP process take 3 times as long as the project production timeline? Of course it will.
9. Is the vendor actually expecting a response from us? If so, throw away their response.
10. Do we already know (prior to creating this RFP) who we were going to select? Of course we did.

Editor’s Note: This is very much a tongue-in-cheek list, and obviously does not apply to any RFP that we have ever submitted to a prospective client … Okay, so it doesn’t apply to most of the RFPs we’ve submitted to propsective clients.