Over many years of my career, I’ve seen a lot of RFPs, mostly on the sell side but also on the buy side. One of the memorable RFP moments for me came from the late 90’s when we hired a new product manager. He came from a large company, the kind that had more than 100,000 employees. We were in the midst of responding to an RFP, and he was talking about his experience on the buy side with one of the vendors’ responses that impressed him. “… and their response was awesome. It was this thick,” he said while holding his fingers three inches apart.
Really? That’s how you measured your vendors? Did anyone actually read the response?
But that’s the way it was done. Companies regularly made, and still make, huge software decisions based on RFP responses, presentations, and site visits. Why? Because enterprise software has always been so complex and unwieldy to implement that as a buyer, you could never actually use the real thing.
That’s what I see changing. The expectation for software for the enterprise is that it must be easier to use. We are pushing the envelope on this concept by offering an instant, free 30-day trial for Zipwire, our new cloud contact center. This no-contract, no-strings-attached trial is a rarity in the industry, in comparison to others which require talking to a rep and having an environment set up for you – or worse, claiming to offer a certain period “free” only by rolling the cost into future billing cycles. I’m seeing companies to whom we sell conducting intensive, real-world trials to compare different solutions. And if the software is not reasonably easy to use, that weakness comes through right away, generally leading to the right conclusion that the software probably is not that well engineered.
Will the RFP disappear? No, but I do hope that we will see it become less important as a document to understand the software capability as companies get smarter about insisting their software providers make it easy to try the real thing.