The section should also include RFP process information such as:

RFP distribution method

Response required (number of copies, format)

Names of decision makers on the evaluation team Vendors invited to participate

Time line for response and review of RFP Criteria for selection and relative weighting

The focus of the document should be on providing information helpful to the vendors, as well as answering the qualifying questions that most smart vendors ask before pursuing a lead:

Is the scope under consideration a good match with my product or service?

Is the playing field level?

Is there a budget approved? Who will make the decision? How long will the evaluation take? Which of my competitors will take part?

Does the client have a clear understanding of what they are doing and a good process for getting there?

Although the buyer of products or services is in the drivers seat during an evaluation, going to the trouble of providing the right kind of information to the candidate vendors in this section ensures that the opportunity is attractive to successful, smart vendors-the exact kind that will be ideal partners.

Because the vendor orientation section of the RFP often contains company proprietary information, the team may want to consider having the vendor recipients sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs). The firms legal team or retained counsel can put together a simple NDA to be completed by all participants.

The second major section of the RFP should be focused on gathering the detailed data from the vendors; this helps determine which vendors should be carried forward through vendor due diligence. This information is similar to the data gathered for the preliminary vendor screening but goes into additional depth. Achieving this level of detail is possible because the individual vendors alone have the expertise to fully answer the questions and because the work is distributed across multiple vendors instead of the selection team.

The typical categories of information to be gathered in this section include:

Vendor: Information concerning the vendor company-size, stability, and resources.

Contact information for this RFP: Account manager, delivery sales representative, senior manager in charge.

Financials: Three- to five-year revenue and profitability history for vendor.

Financials: Three- to five-year revenue and profitability history for the product or service in question.

Company size: Total company employees or other reasonable proxy for understanding overall company resources.

Service or product definition: Details about the service or product under consideration.

Overview of vendor product or service lines: Include revenue distribution among product lines.

Customer qualifications: Positive references from existing customers with similar requirements.

Customer input method: How it works and frequency.

Service levels: How does the vendor measure its delivery or product or services-measures might be quality, user satisfaction, support calls, or other; how does the information get reported internally, and how often; how does information get reported to the customer?

Economics: Vendor list pricing schedules; drivers for pricing.

To facilitate later comparison and analysis, the RFP should provide a clear format and organization for responding to questions. The RFP should also specify the number of hard copies that the vendor must provide, as well as desired electronic formats. The responses should be standardized as much as possible; reading through a large number of responses inconsistent in format and organization adds considerable work to an already labor-intensive process.

Request for Proposal Issue. After the RFP has been created, it should be distributed to the target vendors. The best way to manage the issuance process is to send paper and electronic copies to the sales professionals who have been identified at each vendor. A team member should be designated to make a follow-up call to each vendor to ensure that the package has been received.

To gauge interest in the RFP and provide an equal-footing forum for vendor questions and answers, the evaluation team should consider conducting a bidders preconference one to two weeks after the RFP is issued. This timing ensures that the vendors have had enough time to review the information and show up with good questions. The invitation should limit the number of attendees per vendor to three or fewer. Otherwise, vendors sometimes send

a small army of salespeople, particularly for large proposals. More than one bidders conference we have attended has been so oversubscribed that it had to be postponed or moved to a new location. The conference is also an ideal time to distribute additional information to interested vendors in electronic or paper form.

The agenda for the conference should be simple. The vendor manager should introduce the selection team members and give a brief overview of the material in the vendor orientation portion of the RFP, with a particular focus on expected business benefits and evaluation process. A brief explanation of how the vendor invite list was created may be appropriate here as well. The bulk of the conference should be an open-end question-and-answer session for the vendor representatives. A scribe should document the questions asked (and answers given). If vendors ask questions for which the team does not have a ready answer, the question should be documented and a response sent later. In some cases, the team may simply choose not to answer the question. The entire process should take between 60 and 90 minutes, depending on the RFP complexity and the number of vendors in attendance.

After the conference, the team will have some new information to process. First, the vendor attendance should indicate the level of overall interest that the RFP has generated. If a number of vendors do not attend, there may be several reasons, including a mismatch between the RFP scope and vendors capabilities, a misread of the RFP by the vendor, or even a simple mistake. In any case, the team should contact the vendors who have opted out to solicit their feedback and possibly revise the scope, RFP, or process based on the information.

Second, based on the questions asked by the vendors, the team may find holes in the RFP process. In this case, the team should decide whether any of the previous work should be revisited or refined and what corrective action, if any, to take. Unless the fault is particularly egregious, there should not be any disappointment in a few mistakes. Vendors are highly experienced in scouring and picking apart RFPs.

Within a few days of the conference, the full transcript of questions answered during the session, as well as follow-up questions, should be e-mailed to all vendor representatives. As incremental questions are asked by vendors, they should be documented and the questions and answers should be sent to all vendors.

During the RFP analysis process and the following vendor due diligence, the team should resist the urge to hold information too closely. While some information should not be revealed (e.g., targeted pricing), most information should be shared as widely as possible. A common misconception is that keeping information concealed or responses ambiguous and nonspecific somehow improves the teams negotiating position or negatively impacts the selection process. Quite the opposite is true-most vendors want to put their best foot forward and win a deal by having the superior product or service