RFP? Look At The Vendor Who Says “No”

I’ve received many government RFP’s that as written, could put the agency requesting the proposal and the vendor both at risk. I made the decision a long time ago that I wouldn’t attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole in order to meet revenue goals. I’ve seen it too many times and I just won’t do it. I’ve irritated a lot of salespeople, owners and managers who wanted to reel in that big name, “big-fish” customer when they had zero business participating in the RFP in the first place. I just “No Bid” them and move on.

ThinkGard, the company I work for, from the start, has adopted the same policy and it turns out that we have a 99 percent customer satisfaction rate. We’ve attribute a huge chunk of our success to choosing to not participate in many RFP’s and limiting the services we offer.

You say Limit? Why limit your customers? Why not offer other MSP services such as rack space, networking, web hosting, break fix, telecommunications and general computer support? What about convenient one-stop shopping? Isn’t offering a variety of services important to maintaining a steady stream of revenue? Isn’t it important for customers to have options?

I’m glad you asked.

Our founders previously owned a successful Managed Services Provider. Through all of their IT knowledge and experience, they both decided that the one thing that keeps MSP’s from having even close to 100 percent satisfaction ratings, are that they try to be all things to everyone. And overtime, they realized that with so many competing priorities from the services listed above, even the best providers are at a greater risk for a customer not getting successfully backed up. That’s when they decided to do one thing, and do that one thing better, which is backup & disaster recovery and Security as a managed service and nothing else. Total Data Protection.

Instead of walking in and trying to take over as many IT services as possible or landing that “big-fish”, they decided to help by taking that one huge responsibility of data protection away from busy IT professionals. The one thing that could make or break a stellar IT career in any organization and the one thing that could cost a business EVERTHING due to downtime or a breach.

Our mission at ThinkGard is to help IT professionals by getting rid of the anxiety associated with the risk of ransomware, data loss or downtime. At the end of the day, we really do help people sleep at night.

So the Next time you write an RFP, find out what your vendors really do best before you get reeled-in. Don’t let someone sell you on something that’s less than a perfect fit. And most important, take a closer look at the vendor who’s willing to tell you “no”.