The Seven Biggest Mistakes to Avoid Making in your Outsourced Office Support Services RFP Process

1)    Inviting the wrong or too many vendors to participate in the RFP.

Don’t fall victim to the aggressive sales approach of some vendors just trying to get a foot in the door.  You know, the ones that hound you constantly on the phone and the only way to get rid of them is to break down and agree to include them in the bid process. That’s a mistake in our view.

There is absolutely no point in tendering a bid to a service provider that is not qualified or does not have the market presence to service you.  Instead, it is better to only invite the vendors to bid on your outsourcing services that are capable of providing the services to your company and organization. How to do that? Via a Vendor Prequalification or Request for Information (RFI)

Prequalify your vendors so you don’t feel obligated to tender the RFP to a vendor not qualified to service you. Identify specific criteria to measure the vendors responding on their market share locally and nationally, their clients in your vertical, references, new clients, lost clients and try to get as much in the format as data as possible so you can do quantitative analysis.

You can tender a vendor prequalification or RFI to as many vendors as you want, even to the vendor with that nagging sales rep.  You can use a prequalification to build your industry knowledge. It may come in handy later. But ultimately, it is generally recommended that you decide on no more than 5 vendors to tender a bid or RFP to.  Use your analysis and your subjective evaluation of the vendors to narrow the selection choices down to that small circle via your prequalification. If you’re on the fence about any one vendor, check references that you would have requested in the RFI.

Good luck!

For more information on how to choose an industry consultant and what pitfalls to avoid in your outsourcing RFP process, please ask for our free white paper https://ras-consulting.com/ras-consulting-core-story/

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