For incumbent suppliers, be especially careful to put your best foot forward when responding to an RFP. I have held many uncomfortable meetings with incumbent suppliers who were told that they were going to lose business because they did not take an RFP process seriously and therefore did not make the effort to differentiate versus their competition whether on total cost, or other value added offerings. In these cases, suppliers “assumed” that they would at least make it to the negotiations table because of their past history. Buyers will be evaluating on everything in your RFP submission – both the quantitative and the qualitative - to determine best fit for their respective organizations. Since most RFP’s do assume that there will be some level of negotiations involved, the goal of the RFP submission should be to make it interesting enough that you will make it to the negotiations table and continue to move forward in the process.
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