lies, damn lies, and RFP responses…

You might have thought selecting CRM software was straightforward. After all, all you have to do is work out a set of requirements, issue a request for proposal, and assess the responses.

However the above approach is predicated on one key thing and that is that the information coming back from the vendors is going to be accurate. I get to read a lot of RFP responses and one thing I can tell you is that a lot of responses are less than truthful. In this respect there are two categories. One – the half truth i.e. RFP question ‘Does your software perform function xyz’, response from vendor ‘yes’, the truthful answer being ‘yes, though it involves using a third party module the price of which I haven’t quoted, it will also involves a considerable amount of customization, and it only works with the enterprise version of the software (and I’m quoting you the entry level version) and actually while the module does do what you want, it’s not the best designed piece of software and your users will soon abandon it because it is unfathomably complex to use.’

The second category is the outright untruth i.e. ‘Does your software perform function xyz’, response from vendor ‘yes’, the truthful answer being ‘no, it never has, never will no matter how much fuss you make or money you’re prepared to throw at it.’

While the half truth has always been a key feature of the RFP response, I sense a disturbing increase in the use of the outright untruth. Since the people we tend to deal with are otherwise reliable vendors I’m going to take the view that these are the unintended consequence of a number of key trends. Firstly as salespeople migrate from vendor to vendor looking for the latest ‘hot’ technology to sell, I think there is a tendency to assume because the last application they worked with did it, so the new one will too, which is often simply not the case.

Secondly there’s a trend in the reseller community towards selling a range of CRM technologies rather than just one, and I think knowledge is getting stretched to the point of guesswork.

You will note that in general it’s the salesperson that’s responsible for preparing and RFP response, not, it should be emphasized, people who have any expertise or experience of the hands on implementation of the software, or indeed will have to live with the consequences of over promising and under-delivering (it’s the front line technical staff who have to live with the client’s wrath).

Of course the self-serving moral of this tale is that if you are selecting software it’s wise to use an independent consultant who knows the technologies well enough to tell fact from fiction.

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