Some RFP's Just Aren't Worth the Investment

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by Miller Heiman

One of the most firmly entrenched articles of the corporate sales canon is that you must respond faithfully to every request for proposal or request for a quote. Whether the request comes from an account you've done business with for twenty years or an unknown player who gives you 48 hours to respond, your company has to follow up the lead. If you don't - so goes the given wisdom - you won't get a shot at the next one. The moral: When it comes to customers, treat everybody alike.

Sounds good. Inclusive, optimistic, and most of all "fair." But it makes absolutely no sense.

Ask yourself, how often have we written solid business from an RFP or RFQ that came in at the last minute? If you're like most businesses, the answer will be something like "One time in a thousand" or "Never." In your gut you know that not all requests are alike. You know that when a customer asks you to deliver a proposal in two days, they've probably already decided on another vendor and are rounding up last-minute alternates to show their finance departments that they've shopped around. Responding to a request for proposal in these conditions has about as much chance of landing business as Saddam Hussein has of running for U.S. Congress.

We also know about the leads that do bring business, but the kind of business you later wish you'd never written. We've all run into those irresistible major orders where the post sale costs in service and damage control make your great revenues look like chump change.

Yet we fight on against the current, trolling for leads - in some cases, jumping into the water after them - even when we know there are sharks below. It's odd but true: Most sales professionals would rather pitch stones against a brick wall than not pitch at all.

We says it's time to stop this nonsense. Our advice for how to deal with obviously marginal or potentially deadly "opportunities" is simple. Don't. Let your competition have those thrills. Because your energy and your resources are both finite, focus them where they have a decent chance of paying off. If that chance is merely fair, think about stopping further investment. If it's two steps away from "never," just say no.

We realize this can be a hard - and controversial - concept to accept. The fact is, most salespeople, and most businesses, don't like the idea of pulling back. They resist the hell out of it for four related reasons:

1) Perennial Optimism. Most salespeople believe that a "positive attitude" and "hard work" can work miracles. They can, of course, but only when they're combined with a rigorous attention to the customer's needs, sound account analysis, and good strategy.

2) The Bread On the Water Delusion. For many companies, the standard method of developing sales opportunities is the old broadcast method. Scatter your seeds and hope that one out of a hundred turn into a tree. The idea behind this "philosophy" is that you can't really tell good account opportunities from bad ones, and you really shouldn't try. This attitude, because it leads to force feeding of products and outright deception, has soured thousands of potentially good relationships.

3) We're Already Committed. This occurs when the salespeople decide they've already invested too much time and money into an account to stop now. They're sure they'll get a return on their investment . . . eventually, even if it means investing more money. This combination of pigheadedness and gambler's delirium saps the strength of countless businesses every day.

4) Our Hands Our Tied. This happens when salespeople can't kill an unprofitable area of account activity because they're blocked from doing so by senior management. Once a marketing objective is enshrined in one of those twenty-pound, holy-writ account plans, it becomes "sanctified" by management approval and in many cases becomes part of the Old Man's pet marketing scheme - not infrequently because it represents something that worked for him before he became the Old Man.

The next time you get that RFP or RFQ at the 11th hour, and the chances for success appear to be "fair" at best, don't feel obligated to respond. Sometimes, the best business move is to politely say, thanks, but no thanks.