Key Market Facts
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7,125
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Open tenders on May 3, 2011
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25%
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Rate of RFPs that Keepoint qualifies during its mandates.
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Our Expert Answers Your Questions
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RFPs seem unfeasible and incomprehensible at first reading. How should I qualify them?
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RFP documents are voluminous, between 25 and 75 pages, or even more for projects with lots of specifications. They contain masses of information on the given mandate: contractual, legal, and juridical clauses, rules for the RFP, instructions for bidders, selection process, documents to submit, estimates and technical specifications, financial offer, etc. Each public entity has its own vocabulary for presenting the same points.
When qualifying, it’s important to quickly note the ordering organisation, deadline for submission, technical specifications, and mandatory requirements. A trained eye can pre-qualify an opportunity in less than two minutes. If you feel confident after reviewing these points, then an in-depth qualification should be made for the “bid / no bid” decision.
Fabien Durand
B2G Expert
at Keepoint
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News
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- Bidmatcher : Coming soon as iPhone, Android and Blackberry apps!
- Fabien Durand attends weekly meetings of BNI Corporate Connections One
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Conferences
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- May 4, 2011 — CLD de l’Érable – Plessisville
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Register with Julie
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“To bid or not to bid”: A key question for staying focused!
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| Deciding to respond to an opportunity means you have to invest time and means to the project of writing your bid. Since these resources are limited in today’s companies, Keepoint suggests you ask yourself the following key questions to qualify your opportunities: |
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1- Is this project good for you today? Confirm that all the resources you need to write the content of your proposal are available. Ensure that you can deliver to the required deadline. Evaluate your closest competitors on the RFP (Request for Proposal), your competitiveness, and, finally, whether the project will turn a profit. |
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2- What are my realistic chances of success? Check the date and location of the deadline. Review carefully the criteria for response and selection; ensure that you can respond to them unambiguously. Ask for clarifications from the ordering party. Confirm that all your attestations/certificates are in order. Finally, calculate your potential point total in the evaluation grids, and if you have a minimum score of 75%, only then should you consider offering your services. |
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3- How can I increase my chances of success? If your score is less than 75%, think about how it could be improved: by partnering with another company, contracting with a specialized resource, hiring staff with the qualifications and/or credentials, getting support from a manufacturer, etc. If you don’t have any expertise in RFPs, recruit a consultant who’s an expert in writing proposals. |
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4- Decide “Bid or No Bid”: At the end of the exercise, make a collective decision and document it. If the reasons for refusal repeat themselves, then the path to improvement is clear. Once your decision to make a submission is confirmed, assign a project manager, and plan out your tasks and resources. Good luck! |
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Keepoint offers coaching services to help clients make well-informed qualification decisions that are based on an outside-the-company point-of-view and a thorough understanding of RFPs. Consult us for help! |
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Interview — A Success Story
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| Anne-Marie Longpré is CEO of Longpré Consultants and Associates, a company established in 1984. Specializing in EAP, coaching and organizational development that helps reduce health costs, the firm works with a network of 1,300 professionals across Canada. |
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Given your experience, why is the RFP’s “qualification” stage so important?
In the field of professional services, quality is essential for getting sustainable results with our client. RFPs require each company to define its competencies in a clear and precise way, with no room for ambiguity or interpretation.
The Qualification stage allows each bidder to be compared against the same set of criteria. In the long term, RFPs contribute to a certain consistency in quality standards. However, these criteria do not leave decision-makers any room for judgement. Also, in all cases, organizations must ensure that what they’re writing is true. There can be no gap between real capability and described capability. It’s in all our interests to be known for our sincerity if we hope to win future mandates.
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How is the “Bid or No Bid” decision made? In your opinion, what decision-making criteria stand out?
The principal criteria are the scope and complexity of the project, but above all, the weight given to quality in the final decision.
Much too often, quality is not taken into account in the final decision, and the lowest price becomes the only selection criterion. Over the years, RFPs have contributed greatly to creating a price war in the market. In the last 20 years, we’ve seen a drop in prices of up to 30%. And yet, both the value of professionals and the needs in the workplace have been on the rise. So quality is at risk, and thus the goal of reducing health costs becomes more difficult to reach, and so collateral costs increase for the same reason.
We’ve lost long-standing clients for a few dollars’ difference over three years; that can be quite discouraging. We prefer channelling our energy towards mandates where quality is valued and the long-term vision is important. A paradox exists in the fact that the sought-after results require acting on the human resources of an organization over a medium-to-long-term period, while RFPs, much too often, are restricted to a short-term financial view: generally, one or three years.
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From the time you became interested in government RFPs, what impact have you felt on your company?
Obviously, RFPs open up your access to business opportunities with a lot of potential, given the size of public and parapublic organizations. Companies of all sizes can offer their product.
Unfortunately, given the term of the contracts granted, RFPs don’t favour long-term client relationships and leave your client base more vulnerable to turnover. As we make our decision to bid, we must consider the scale of the mandate as a percentage of our total revenue, so as to better manage the risk if we were to lose the client.
My collaboration with Fabien allowed me to benefit from his advice in the field of RFPs, gain some objectivity, and save time.
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