Go hard or stay home…

There was a point that I missed when I did my ‘9 ways CRM vendors can improve their RFP responses’ post the other week, and that’s ‘go hard, or stay home’ (as an old athletics coach of mine was fond of saying). In any batch of RFP responses we receive there’s normally a few where the author’s heart clearly wasn’t in it, and while they had taken the time to respond, it was clearly something of a token effort.

It intrigues me why people do this to themselves, after all a poor RFP response is still time-consuming to put together, perhaps not as time-consuming as a good one, but there’s probably not a lot in it in relative terms. Perhaps it’s a triumph of optimism over common sense and respondents figure that at least if they get something in however poor, there’s a chance that all the other competitors will get struck by lightening, or similar freak accident of nature, and they’ll win by default. In many cases it’s clear some poor sole or reseller has been dumped with the task of responding, however pointless they feel the exercise maybe, and go through the motions simply to tick the box with their boss or software author that the task has been completed.

Given that few organisations are going to purchase a CRM system from a vendor who hasn’t taken the trouble to craft a credible response I figure vendors could save themselves a lot of unnecessary effort if they took a more clinical approach to determining if an opportunity is worth chasing. The most successful organisations I’ve worked with pick their shots carefully, and once they’re satisfied its business they want and can win, they’ll throw everything at it. Saying no to an opportunity is not a sign of weakness, and CRM vendor selections exercises are not (generally) lotteries.

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