Shining a spotlight on the moments when customer value is created in a live RFQ event.
Todays post is by Dave Wenig is the Senior Vice President of Sales and Services at SafeSourcing Inc.
In this post, which is the second of several, we’re continuing to take a close look at the online Request for Quote (RFQ) from a different perspective. Rather than focus on measuring the value delivered as savings, let’s examine when that value is created and consider the vendor behaviors that went into that moment. If you need a primer on what an RFQ is, click here.
In part one of this series Watching and RFQ Part 1, we reviewed the first five or so minutes of the RFQ. While the beginning of the RFQ can at times be interesting, it isn’t always a good indicator of what will come.
The same can’t usually be said about the middle of the RFQ. I would consider the middle of a typical RFQ to be from around 5 minutes in to around 15 minutes in. While it doesn’t always look like there is a great deal of activity in this portion, I would argue that looks can be misleading.
In the example above, there are several things that are happening in this 10 minute window. First, the SafeSourcing Customer Services team and some of the participating vendors are usually in communications off and on during this time. The second is that the vendors will start to become active and begin to test the waters. Again, there are different approaches and different tolerances for the emotional impact of participating in an auction. Here, we see that some of the vendors decided to try small reductions in their costs in an effort to “fish” for the Low Quote Indicator that would tell them they are doing well. We see that another takes a drastically different approach and enters significantly lower costs that most of the competition.
In this phase of the RFQ, what we see if the vendors jockeying for position as they head into the final lap. They know that this particular RFQ was scheduled for 20 minutes plus extensions so they will want to be ready to compete in the final phase. We’ll get into the last portion of the RFQ in the next installment.
For more information, please contact SafeSourcing.
