Editorial Reviews Review "As a writer of RFPs, I found your well-thought out and documented approach for vendors' consideration to be a great road map. If I was a cheering section, you would hear the roars. "One of the challenges many consultants (and clients) often encounter is getting longer lead times, for both sides. Time to write and document all the background and requirements, as well as sufficient time for the vendor to prepare their proposal. This, however, is not an excuse for either side to be sloppy or ill-prepared. "Having said that, it is still amazing to see how many companies' proposals "cut and paste generalizations en mass," use hyperbole throughout, don't justify why they should be selected and don't follow directions. "I hope that companies take your book seriously enough to better manage if and how they respond to RFPs. "Thanks for the high-value proposition." --Gloria Kurant, President, KURANT DIRECT INC."An RFP can be a wonderful opportunity or a destructive waste of company resources. If you get involved with an RFP, make sure you are in it to win and you know what you are doing. RFPs Suck! will help you navigate the RFP world and give you the ammunition to make the best choices (from the start) to grow your business." --Joe Pulizzi, Co-Author, "Get Content. Get Customers." Founder, Junta42"Tom Searcy's 'RFPs Suck!' embodies the same enlightened wisdom and insight responsible for helping our company land a project in excess of $50 million. Working with Tom over the years has been one of the more stimulating and rewarding experiences of my professional life. I have come to regard Tom as a close personal friend and can't wait to engage him again." --Richard H. Drennen, President, Superior Mechanical, Inc."This is the first book I've seen on this grossly overlooked topic and it's definitely a winner. Smaller firms hoping to land large corporate customers will find the most value, but even sellers from big companies will learn some new tricks. "In short, you'll discover how to qualify, divide and conquer RFPs that make the most sense for your company." --Jill Konrath, Author, "Selling to Big Companies" and Founder, SellingtoBigCompanies.com"This book is a serious keeper. No fluff. No B.S. It's stuffed (as in every pixel on every page) with pointers, recommendations, checklists and whatever else you may need to logically and objectively decide whether to respond to an RFP and, more importantly, how to respond to it. "If you receive only a single, unsolicited RFP in your career, you need this book to guide you in deciding how to respond to it." --Dave Stein, CEO & Founder, ES Research Group, Inc. From the Author When my marketing team told me that I should write an e-book on RFPs and offer it to readers for free on my website, I thought they were out of their minds. But thousands of downloads and seemingly hundreds of "Thank You" notes later, I realized that the demand for this type of material was strong and growing. And so I've expanded what was once limited material into what I like to think of as the ultimate guide to conquering RFPs--whether government, private or public--by adding several additional winning techniques and a number of sample RFP responses (with critiques). I also did my due diligence by surveying my audience about the mysteries and troubles they've encountered in their RFP traumas experiences and addressed them here. Thanks go to Wynola Richards for her tireless work on this project. To Carajane Moore for handling the many things that could have easily interfered with the undertaking of a new book. To Richard Drennen for his innovative approach to the world of RFPs. To Dan Kemper's critical eye and nimble mind. To Dave Stein for his continual support and for contributing the foreword to this book. To Jack Burns for always being the voice of reason, balance and practical application. And last but not least, thanks to my publishing team at Channel V Books. You are all a huge thorn in my side, which is precisely why we work so well together. From the Back Cover RFPs are a mixed blessing. If you Google "answering RFPs," you'll get 30 articles detailing how awful the whole RFP process is for every one article advising you how to actually deal with it. It used to be that you could ignore RFPs. Only a small portion of the market used RFPs in their buying process and you could work around those companies. Besides, only the mega-deals required that kind of rigor. Conventional wisdom prevailed and we all felt just a little cocky when we were the incumbents writing the specifications with the client, who was only putting out the RFP because the board required it. We would write our own answers to our own questions and then look over the shoulders of the evaluation group as they used our rubric to score our competitors' responses. We just knew we were going to torpedo past the competition. Those on the receiving end--who spent weeks slaving over the RFP in hopes of winning the business--had every right to feel bitter. In fact, it was hard not to. RFPs are often designed to favor the incumbent or are nothing more than the buyer's means of gathering free consulting or market research from the participating companies. Because of this, it's not surprising that several organizations have vowed to never answer an RFP again, no matter what. I suspect it was once an easy promise to keep, considering the complexities and politics of the process, but times have changed. Governance rules dictated by boards and administered by fi nance through groups like purchasing or procurement have made RFPs and RFQs a dominating component of the large-deal world. So now, not only can you not ignore them, but you don't have access to write the specs for them either (but neither does your competition). And if the deal has adult money in it, you'd better believe there will be an RFP, an RFQ or another qualifying process that looks amazingly similar. The bottom line is if you don't want to get stuck in the land of little dreams or little deals, you're going to need your `A' game when handling RFPs. Even for those of you who are still adamant about avoiding RFPs at all costs, there will inevitably come a day when that irresistible RFP lands on your desk. You know the one: you glance at it and can almost smell the boatloads of money and hear the accolades of your business associates. "I think we should do this," you'll say to yourself. "Now, who's the best writer we have?" Sound familiar? Between the companies I've run and the companies I've helped, I'm sitting on $1.5 billion+ in landed deals through the RFP/RFQ processes. I almost never wrote the specs for the RFP before it went out. Instead, I figured out a system that allows me and my clients to know when we should quit the process with confidence before it even starts, and when we should stay in and kick ass. This book is your best guide on what to know, question and do when faced with an RFP. And it's dedicated to YOU, the CEOs, salespeople and all others looking to land big sales. May you find great success in your undertaking. About the Author Tom Searcy is a national speaker, author, trusted authority on large account sales, and founder of Hunt Big Sales, a fast growth sales consultancy and thought leadership organization. Searcy's primary expertise is working directly with companies and sales teams throughout their big sales "hunts," helping them to compete and win disproportionately large sales in highly competitive markets. His philosophy and process, both of which are documented in his 2008 book Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Deals and Transform Your Company (with co-author Barbara Weaver Smith), have resulted in over $3 billion in new sales for his company and its clients. Before entering the national stage, Searcy headed four corporations, each of which he was able to take from annual revenues of less than $15 million to over $100 million--all before the age of 40. Since then, Searcy has helped more than 100 companies grow exponentially with his proven process for fast growth and company-wide transformation. In RFPs Suck!, Searcy shares his rich understanding of the RFP process with companies across the board to help them conquer the RFP system once and for all to win corporate and government contracts. Read more