Short, Sweet & Valuable

It is 2 months since my last blog, not great but I am committing to sharing more of our thoughts going forward.

An exciting event has occurred since my last blog. Capital has been selected to provide services to the largest corporate mover of people in the world. We are preparing a joint press release that will be out soon. With this success, I still find myself thinking about the “RFP process.” Here’s what I found most interesting about the RFP we just won – our response was 29 pages (still too long in my opinion), while one of our competitors submitted a 168 page response.

Most purchasing organizations are not knowledgeable about relocation services. They may understand “logistics,” but they don’t understand what the processes that are required to create and implement a sustainable, repeatable relocation process. Their process for buying logistics makes relocation supplier selection (or any other purchasing decision) a “commodity” exercise at the best, and a complete waste of time at the worst – for both client and relocation company. Sellers have responded to this by throwing more and more information (most of it irrelevant to selecting the right supplier) in their RFP responses.

The RFP process, as it is practiced today, is bad all around. Most companies don’t spend an adequate amount of time or attention putting together an intelligent RFP, and third-party suppliers take the proverbial throw (expletive deleted) against the wall – hoping it would stick. The scary thing for me is that the recent trend among RFPs is that they are getting longer (both the length of the RFP itself and most suppliers responses), not shorter. I think it was Abraham Lincoln who once apologized at the end of a letter to one of his generals for “not having had the time to make the letter shorter.”

These lengthy and largely ineffective RFPs simply increase the costs for all those associated in the process, without providing an additional benefit. Shorter, more direct RFPs and responses to those RFPs will be better for everyone.