Arbor Ops on Why You Shouldn’t Use RFPs

Thomas Ptacek | July 11th, 2006 | Filed Under: Industry Punditry, Uncategorized

Hey, Carlos, I read your RFP post. You’ve been talking to the sales team again, haven’t you? Or you read a book on lead gen. In any case, I liked:

I don’t know who dislikes RFPs more: vendors who have to answer them or customers who have to create them and then read all the responses.

Let me answer that one for you, Carlos. You hate them more than the customers do.

You go on to say:

With websites, on-line or print product reviews, tradeshows, peer groups, Webex sessions, and product trials, it’s relatively easy to find out what solutions best meets your needs.

Well, allow me to retort. Let’s start by taking those alternatives one-by-one:

  • Websites as a substitute for RFPs: Be serious. The typical security product website comes from the same source document as the product’s printed slick. Do we want to use Arbor’s site as a case study?

  • Print product reviews as a substitute for RFPs, or, “and you thought the RFP process was biased!”. A typical eval period for a high-end IPS is several months, on a real network. A typical eval for that same IPS in a magazine is several days, and on a lab network. There are good reviews (though they’re in the minority), but does anyone really select products based on them?

  • Tradeshows as a substitute for RFPs. Yes. Free drinks and a trip to a strip club are more valuable than all the boilerplate crud that goes into a typical RFP. You may have me on this one.

  • Peer groups as a substitute for RFPs. Because despite claims to the contrary, your vendor will not sue you for violating the NDA you signed in order to get the product in the door, and can’t wait to get you the list of everyone in your area that has evaluated the product, whether they selected it or not.

  • Webex sessions, also known as “sales calls”, as a substitute for RFPs. I’ll admit that regardless of the formal process you have in place for selecting products, the actual selection is hugely influenced by sales calls.

That leaves us with product trials. Of course you’re going to do product trials. The purpose of an RFP is to downselect to a manageable number of vendors. So, circular argument. I challenge you: come up with a real alternative to RFPs (ie, not just, “simply research and choose a solution that best matches needs”), or come up with real suggestions on how to run better RFP processes.

5 Comments so far

  • Dave G.

    July 11th, 2006 12:21 pm

    No doubt vendors hate them more. Customers will usually get a result out of the process that accomplishes something. Vendors can invest a tremendous amount of time and energy responding to them, and may not even have a chance to win. I remember I was working on an RFP, and moments before we submit the response, someone on our team looked at the File Properties of the RFP (it was a word doc). Let’s just say it was disheartening to see a competitor’s name as the author of the document.

  • wpn

    July 11th, 2006 4:24 pm

    Not only that, but in the public sector, where all contracts and purchases have to be justified, accounted for and audited in excruciating detail, the RFP is absolutely necessary. You have to prove that you had a planned set of requirements, and you have to demonstrate that your process for selecting the right vendor to meet those requirements was above-board, fair, and provided the “best value” to the taxpayers. (Well, that’s the theory, anyway.) Just try explaining to an auditor that you watched a WebEx and picked up some brochures at a trade show in order to spend $100K …

  • Thomas Ptacek

    July 11th, 2006 4:48 pm

    You’re making my point more clearly than I am, Wendy.

    The alternatives to RFPs have less transparency than RFPs, and don’t really do anything to promote better decision-making.

    I also feel like I should make the point that, despite being a tiny company, Matasano has excelled in some cases based purely on RFP responses, in situations where (for lack of a direct sales team) we couldn’t have succeeded otherwise.

  • Paul M

    July 12th, 2006 9:54 am

    Tom - you could make a similar argument that one should use astrology to make the decision, because tarot cards and teas leaves are so unreliable!

    I understand it was hard to resist a critique of the sales process, which seems like justification enough for the blog entry, but are you also saying that successful security organizations _should_ do RFPs?

    Yes, nothing cuts through the marketing bullsh*t like a good RFP! Most RFPs are largely an exercise in cntl-c/cntl-v of the same three year-old copy you’d get through other channels.

    The stack of paper is undoubtably impressive to auditors and managers, but there are probably more efficient ways than having 5-10 companies collaborate on a giant position-piece.

  • Thomas Ptacek

    July 12th, 2006 1:44 pm

    I can’t argue with the sales team objection to RFPs. Sales teams aren’t making the problems up. A good portion of RFP’s are pro-forma exercises designed to rubber-stamp a vendor selection that happened months earlier.

    I didn’t start the blog discussion on RFPs, but I do feel compelled to respond to the claim that Webex prezo’s and trade shows are an effective replacement, or that the majority of the market is well served by “simply doing some research and making a good decision”.

    I can’t speak to whether astrology is better than RFPs. But it’s better than a trip to RSA.

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