As I wrote in To Bid or not to Bid, that is the Question, when a vendor is presented with a request for tender (RFT) or request for proposal (RFP), it must decide whether or not to bid and there will be occasions, whether well-judged or misjudged, that the company decides to not bid after which the enterprise issuing the RFT is advised of the no-bid decision. In many cases the actual reasons for not bidding won’t be disclosed – there are many legitimate reasons for not bidding and a vendor is under no obligation to disclose them. But for some reason, there are vendors, or perhaps individuals working for vendors, who, when having decided to not bid, go on to challenge the tender process and rubbish clauses within the RFT document or even the tender process as a whole. Here are some examples:
l it is “normal” for companies to choose our product, then to tender to a number of our resellers for the best price;
l you should delay the project schedule until next year when we have a new super duper product coming;
l we are too busy to respond but we have sold many systems recently so you should see a demonstration anyways [And what will that achieve as we’ll be evaluating responses from companies who want to do business with us?];
l we won’t respond to your RFT but we’d like to submit a proposal [trying to sell around the tender process];
l we don’t respond to tenders, or we respond to only those tenders written specifically for us;
l we will only respond to your RFT if you guarantee we will win at least some of the business being tendered for;
l [the client] stole all our “great ideas” when we responded to a previous RFT so we won’t respond to this one;
l we will respond to your RFT only after you agree to pay us for preparing a response;
l [before spell checking was automatic in Microsoft Word] how dare you tell us to spell-check our proposals, we are a large international company! [should spell-checking be required only of small, local companies?];
l we imagine that clause such and such (out of 100s of clauses) is mandatory and we can’t comply with it.
As I also wrote in To Bid or not to Bid, that is the Question, not responding to an RFT may result in the vendor not being considered for future procurement projects. It goes without saying that vendors who rubbish one procurement project will lessen their chances of being considered for the next.
Tags: "IT procurement" process, "respond to proposal", "respond to tender", “IT infrastructure”, infrastructure, procurement, RFP, RFT
