LeapComp - Sales Performance Management Blog

I hope you were not thinking that all the hard work was over when the RFP was completed; evaluating the responses to the RFP (the proposals) is another big task with many challenges.

• The proposals are usually fairly thick, and it takes time to go through them. That’s why I recommended doing good upfront work at shortlisting the right vendors. RFP evaluation is a big time commitment, but after putting so much time in writing the RFP, it’s not time to cut corners here.
• Just as with the actual RFP creation, many people need to be involved in the evaluation process. For example, maybe someone on the “technical side” added a question regarding information security. Each vendor is now listing several measures by how they protect information and how the application was architected with security in mind. This person is likely to be required to evaluate this question because the business team may not know which answer is the best.
• As with my example above, it is often hard to rate an answer without some knowledge of what these incentive compensation applications can do. Answers can all look very similar.

The goal of the proposal evaluation is to further reduce the number of vendors in the race. The next step is usually the vendor’s demos, but these are time consuming and it’s not practical to have all 3-5 shortlisted vendors selected. A good number of vendors is usually 2 or 3.

Evaluation Methodology
Each proposal evaluator should know ahead of time what is expected from them, and when they should expect to receive the proposals. Along with the proposals, an evaluation grid should be provided. Everyone can try to evaluate every question, but it often makes sense to separate business and technical questions. Each evaluator evaluates the relevant questions and returns the evaluation grid for each proposal to a certain person responsible for consolidating the scores. When every evaluation is received, that person will aggregate all the scores for each question, and create an average. A meeting to discuss the scores can then be scheduled, where any large discrepancy in scores can be discussed (person A gave a low score on a certain question, and person B gave a very high score). As a result, there should be 2 or 3 proposals ahead of the others.

Alternative Evaluation Methods

• Every evaluator can meet in person and discuss each question. The goal is to come up with a consensus on what the score should be. This method also works, but seems to be more time consuming. Scheduling a meeting with a large group of people often seems to be a challenge.
• I have seen many proposal evaluations being outsourced entirely, especially on government contracts. I think this is generally a bad idea since this 3rd party does not have a very good knowledge of your requirements, and potentially does not have any knowledge of the sales performance industry. It can be beneficial to get help from a 3rd party when evaluating the proposals, but I wouldn’t recommend relying entirely on this 3rd party.

The key element to evaluate the proposals is to have a well defined evaluation grid. If everyone stick to the same format, it will be much easier and quicker to consolidate the scores, and there should be less ambiguity on how to evaluate each answer.