When you shouldn't respond to that RFP...

Did you know many states have regulations where public organizations must issue a competitive RFP when the contract value reaches a certain size?

Whether public or not, healthcare organizations often enter into an RFP process when they’re making a sizable purchase and want to compare several solutions in the space. While some may genuinely be competitive, it’s not unheard of for their to be a “selected” winner by the time the process begins.

Between my time at Mend, Panda, and Healthie, I’ve been involved in dozens of RFPs, mostly on the selling side but also several on the evaluation side.

My first taste of a true RFP process was in 2019 when a healthcare organization with annual revenues north of $30 billion was looking to rollout a virtual care offering and needed to upgrade their virtual care tech stack. At Mend, we were well suited to take on a variety of tasks for them ranging from scheduling, forms, and the video visit platform.

So what happened? Did we win?

As a new Account Executive, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to take on this RFP that seemed to drop out of nowhere. (The first red flag.) You know an RFP drops out of nowhere when someone shares via your company’s website form that they’re starting and RFP process and would like to invite your company to participate.

This MASSIVE company happened to invite us to sign an NDA to begin the process. Standard, totally normal start to an RFP process.

Once we signed the NDA, we hopped on a call to learn more abour what kicked off the process and they shared an excel sheet for us to answer their questions. After a couple weeks of compiling all the answers… came the worst part. We had to import it all into SAP.

After a couple weeks of them reviewing our submission we were shortlisted along with a couple other vendors.

Invited to Boston?

Being shortlisted meant that we were flying up to Boston to present our product and answer a number of technical follow up questions. Yep, there I was, a 21 year old AE flying up with our President and our CEO to give it our all.

That was our mistake.

What vibe does it give off when a company that you know has less than 75 employees sends both their CEO and their President across the country tp help with the sales pitch?

Well, even though they said we nailed the presentation and our product fulfilled their requirements, they could not have their company operations depend on a company of our size.

If you didn’t get it yet, the message it sends is this deal means a LOT… too much. One of my biggest lessons in going upmarket in sales was that the sale is as much, if not more, about your company than it is about your product.

The RFP We Won….Two Years Later

Two years later and about eight months into COVID, a new RFP showed up on my desk (figuratively). Except this time, it wasn’t completely random. I had actually met the consultant running the project about 10 months earlier when he was working on a different project. Now, this time the prospect wasn’t the size of a Fortune 500 company, but it was certainly large enough to fight to be the biggest account in the company’s history.

This time the process started the same, NDA, then RFP sheet, then product demos. The only difference was this time we did the demos virtually because it was COVID season.

The real difference was how we treated the rest of the process. In healthtech RFPs you probably know that integrations into the EHR are a key part of the evaluation process. This prospect was a small health system so we were getting questions like “What’s your experience integration with Epic?” and “What data can you read/write discretely?”

If you’ve been involved in integrations, you know prospects treat a hypothetical, “We can integrate this way” with an experienced “We have integrated this way.”

Not only did we come with the relevant experience this time, we came with documentation and templated processes that made it look like we were experts. We talked about our implementation and customer success process with such detail so it felt like they could turn a blind eye and have their complete faith in us.

On the other hand, when we were in the other deal we treated the enterprise prospect with “We’ll do what it takes to win this deal. Let us know what we need to do.” Small an mid-sized companies often love this treatment. It’s something they never hear. They get the standard treatment. But, when big companies hear this, what they really think is “O, you’ve never done this before.” A billion dollar organization can not put their faith in a company that hasn’t been around the block. They don’t want to hear you’ll do anything, they want to hear that you’ve served companies their size and know how to make them successful.

Don’t get distracted.

If you’re average deal size is $50,000 and an RFP opportunity comes in for a million dollar contract, your Account Executive will be head over heels thinking about the commission opportunity. The AE will also probably say things like we should bend here and there because of the revenue opportunity of this deal. But, the difference between these two accounts isn’t just a lot of customer success resources, it’s a new level of customer support, new product marketing and communications, and someone with a deeper hand in your product roadmap.

If you’re truly going upmarket and the large prospect is a perfect fit for your product (please…) then yes go for it. But, don’t put all your sales resources into a deal that you likely weren’t positioned to win.

The cliche - if you didn’t design it, you’re not winning it.

It’s often said in sales that the winner of the RFP is the company that wrote it. That’s because the prospect is often engaged with a potential vendor by the time they’re rolling out the RFP. That vendor is the one guiding them through the buying process, telling them the features they need, and guiding them what to look for in RFPs. Now, it’s not often that the vendor is truly writing it but they may be a key part of helping the prospect understand what they need. So if you don’t feel like you’re a great fit for the features in the RFP, someone else is telling them why those features are critical to their success.

So hopefully now you know…

When that RFP isn’t worth it…