Entrepreneurs Club - Time to Revamp the rfp

The GSA is mindful of how important smaller players are in bringing agility, flexibility and innovation to its members’ organisations. There are plenty of blockers that don’t make partnering easy for either side. For the smaller players, it is difficult to initially find opportunities and then get a foot in the door, for a multitude of reasons, to include corporate due diligence processes and unrealistically high revenue levels required.

Enterprise buyers are conversely finding it hard to change their processes and don’t know where to start in looking for small businesses to shortlist to bring into their eco-systems. This GSA Entrepreneur’s Club session took a look at the RFP process and what smaller players and enterprise buyers should do to make the process easier for both sides. 

As an industry, we need to encourage buyside organisations to review their tender processes to make them more inclusive to SMEs. The questions asked during an RFP process usually discount an SME from the get-go. For example, SMEs are asked for their experience across a large portfolio of customers, which they may not be able to provide, and for their positioning in analyst rankings, such as the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Running an analyst relations program is not financially viable for many of the smaller players. Many stakeholders will not sign up to anyone without a breadth of proven experience in their exact domain, leaving many highly innovative players on the way-side.

The process needs to become more flexible and the question-sets more inclusive of the ways SMEs operate. For example, with the increasing focus on ESG, the carbon footprint of an SME is likely to be a lot lower than that of a large company, and they can probably tell you exactly what they are doing to lower this further across the business, but they are highly unlikely to have a team or person or budget dedicated to it and so lose points in this area. As such, there is a need for enterprise buyers to both consider proportionality, but also to reimagine the question sets so that SMEs can better present themselves.

In all cases, there must be a high level of collaboration from the beginning and enterprise buyers should be willing to support and guide an SME throughout the process. Using a smaller business or a start-up requires a change in mindset which will not happen overnight. There is a lot we can do as an industry to help SMEs ‘punch above their weight’ in terms of responding to tenders, having a strong qualification process, promoting best practice in managing those tenders and advising how to answer questions in the RFP process correctly. We must also improve our ability to share success stories, which as an industry we don’t do so well - the regulations can be restricting but it’s all about sharing how to work with them. Expect more on all of this from the GSA.