Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Another reason behind these untruthful RFPs is the popularity of standardized spreadsheets used by many chains. The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS) of the National Retail Federation (NRF), for example, has a popular Excel RFP template that it offers to members. Retailers certainly customize them—adding many specific requirements—but a healthy percentage of the original document is often used.

These templates are helpful. But the more formulated they are, the easier it is to evaluate offerings by a literal checklist approach. One nice trick to use when creating your RFPs is to make sure you have a question that cannot be answered truthfully with a “yes”—as in, “Without knowing any of our internal operational details, can you provide an precise roadmap for completion?” That way, you can quickly sniff out vendors that are answering questions without reading—or at least without thinking about—them.

This idea came out of a conversation I had the other day with Gene Cornell, president of a POS software company called Cornell-Mayo Associates. Cornell was complaining about often getting outbid, and he recently had an unusual occasion to learn of the specific lies a rival told during a retail bid, he said.

“That the largest companies in our business con retailers on a regular basis shows that caveat emptor is still the rule in choosing software. There is no penalty for dishonesty, and dishonest responses are rewarded over honest ones,” he said. “I don’t believe that blindly accepting the answer most favorable to the vendor is the right way to make a critical decision.”

Cornell clearly has a strong motivation. But the fact is, the type of open approach we’re describing would actually make some of the vendors act as your fact-checkers. This is hardly a new concept; law firms have, for decades, pitted associates against each other, having them check each other’s work. It might not be the best way to engender good colleague interactions, but it wonderfully accomplishes two objectives: catching errors and ultimately making fewer errors happen (as associates know that their colleagues will be only too happy to discover them).

For most large chains, the RFP process has fundamentally gone unchanged for a huge number of years. Don’t you think it deserves a nice refresh?