Ann All spoke with Tom Searcy, founder of Hunt Big Sales, a sales consultancy and thought leadership organization. He is co-author with Barbara Weaver Smith of "Whale Hunting: How to Land Big Deals and Transform Your Company" (Wiley) and author of “Landing Big Sales with an RFP." His new book is "RFPs Suck! How to Master the RFP System Once and for All to Win Big Business" (Channel V Books). Go to the Knowledge Network to get an excerpt of this book.

All: Is responding to RFPs a bigger challenge for SMBs than for larger companies?
Searcy: It is challenging for small businesses to have an RFP strategy because of the resources it takes. Big companies may have a dedicated team answering RFPs. But that shouldn’t discourage small companies. Out of $1.6 billion my clients have landed through RFPs, in every case my clients were smaller than other responders.

The real issue for smaller companies is getting a strategy. The key is in knowing which RFPs are in your sweet spot. A big mistake many people make is, they cut-and-paste all their answers to RFPs from a standard set of documents. I’ve read hundreds of RFP responses, and guess what? You can tell the ones that have been cut-and-pasted. If you’re a small company, you should answer a small number of RFPs. But if you really invest in the ones you answer, your success rate will be much higher.

All: So cutting-and-pasting answers is a mistake. What are some others that companies make in responding to RFPs?
Searcy: People answer RFPs believing their audience is going to read the entire RFP. But typically three to 10 people will read it. The RFP is internally broken into sections. So the money guys are going to read the money questions. The engineering guys are going to read the engineering questions. So if you want to make several good points about your company in the RFP, you need to write them into every answer.

All: So don’t summarize your strengths and bring them together for a big finish?
Searcy: Right. Figure out your two or three key ideas upfront, then emphasize them multiple times. If what you’re good at is superior execution in manufacturing, then work that idea into every single question.

All: Anything else?

Searcy: Another mistake that companies make is investing the same amount of effort into all the RFP answers. You need to figure out which questions are the most important ones. They over-answer in one area, cutting-and-pasting 2,000 words about the history of their company in response to the question, “Tell us about your company.” Then in response to a question about their three strengths, they might put three two-sentence paragraphs. So they’re not strategic in their answers.

Another mistake I see is trying to answer everything with a superlative. In the book, we talk about how many of your answers in an RFP will match those of your competitors. So go ahead and say, “All of the credible vendors you are looking at will have these claims.” Then go on to say, “In addition to that, here’s what makes us different.” You need to focus on that 10 percent difference. What you’re trying to do is say, “Who cares about those claims from the competition. Everybody can do that.”

All: Of course,  this assumes you research your competitors. I assume that’s important, too.
Searcy: Right.

All: What about mistakes made by companies issuing RFPs?
Searcy: You see a lot of RFPs written by consultants. They’re written with a volume criteria in mind. They make the RFP complex, with lots of extra details that don’t really impact the performance of the program. I think you should leave those details out. Get right down to what you really want.

RFPs are also often written by people responsible for governance or purchasing or procurement. They write them around compliance standards rather than around business performance. So I think the RFP should be arranged with all of the compliance requirements presented in one place and the performance requirements somewhere else. That allows the companies answering the RFP to have their legal and financial people answer the compliance requirements and those people who will actually be doing the work to answer the performance requirements.

All: How can a company determine whether it’s worth it to respond to an RFP? Are there times when it isn’t worth it?
Searcy: First of all, when surveyed, 72 percent of Fortune 500 companies admitted they had sent out RFPs even though they had already selected the vendor they were going to use. So that statistic tells you 72 percent of RFPs are a waste of time. So how do you know? We tell people in the book to avoid companies that won’t give you access to people for follow-up questions or to provide more information. That’s usually an indicator [that] it’s a waste of time.

Second, if they’ve invited too many people to participate, you should avoid it. It’s like going to a cocktail party where you’re told you’re special and a thousand people show up. Third, if they want samples, prototypes and drawings, and there isn’t a quid pro quo, a budget or a declaration of how all of this information is going to be used, then it’s just a fishing trip.

Fourth, if you don’t know anybody, you’ve never done work for the company, and you don’t know why you’ve been asked, don’t answer it. The majority of people we talk to, that would knock out two-thirds of the RFPs they receive. They just get an RFP because they are on some industry list somewhere. Also, if they control the length of your responses too tightly, then they are saying they don’t want information, they just want pricing. That’s a good indicator they don’t want to hear what you can offer them. They are just using you to do a price survey against other competitors.

All: What is the single most important thing to remember when responding to an RFP?
Searcy: RFPs are not designed to help companies make good decisions. They are designed to help companies avoid bad decisions. Because of that, you have to spend more of your time showing the person sending out the RFP that your company is a good, safe decision to make. Most companies spend their time talking about how great they are. What they need to do is show how stable they are.