How Can We Improve the RFP Process for Language Services?

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Confession time: I have a love-hate relationship with RFPs and RFIs for language services. And I may not be the only one.

With my LSP hat on, I love them because they are so often the result of the hard work of many other colleagues that brought in the given request in the first place – marketing, sales, or client services people. I know this isn’t easy. And they’re an opportunity to propose some real innovation to buyers that could genuinely make their life easier. For buyers, it’s an opportunity to get some real value and have confidence that their selected partners are a great fit for them.

But I also sometimes sort of “hate” RFPs when I see them, because they often fail to live up to their true potential. They may fail to help the B2B services selection process where they’re deployed. Very often, they reveal the role the localization function may play in a given organization, warts and all, and how they get to collaborate with procurement and other functions.

This is certainly nothing new. It’s been like this ever since I learned the meaning of the acronym LSP. But in 2022, we have an opportunity to do better.

The reality is that the buying process has changed considerably over the years. Business buyers have amazing access to industry information. They talk with their peers and exchange experiences, they get content online and on social media, they listen to podcasts, they attend events, they engage in online communities. This is what dark social is all about.

In other words, buyers across industries are more informed than even before. They can initiate their buying process equipped with information that should help them accelerate the whole RFP process. But they don’t always take advantage of it. So here are a few ideas to consider if we want to make the RFP experience better for everyone involved.

Caveat venditor

It’s not unusual for RFPs to fail to give LSPs enough information to handle them optimally. It’s broadly these areas that lack detail: an overall lack of context (why is the RFP process being launched and what is it supposed to achieve?), evaluation and selection criteria, and details about the actual production and technical setup at the buyer.

All this information can allow LSPs to make a qualified go/no-go decision regarding whether it makes sense to proceed with responding. This is because delivering a customized, relevant proposal (rather than a set of cookie-cutter responses) will require a significant amount of time and effort. So sometimes it’s simply better to walk away early on.

Ideally, RFPs should not be launched to conduct market research with a high number of LSPs, or to “kick the tires” with no intention of ultimately engaging with them. There are better ways to do that.

The need to know

It is obviously unreasonable for RFPs to always contain only questions that would concern language services (or any other set of services required). This is because procurement, whether they lead the process or are at least involved, normally has many other factors to consider when deciding whether a supplier should be qualified or selected: financial legal, strategic, corporate social responsibility, etc. They need to be included, even if at first sight they may seem irrelevant. No beef here.

But it’s still not unusual to see questions specific to the actual services that are very hard (or even impossible) to answer. My personal favorites include “list all the clients you’ve worked with for more than a year” and “list all your in-country suppliers.”

Whatever we do, it always pays off to put ourselves in the shoes of the other party. If you’re an LSP, go to great lengths to understand the specific situation of the buyer, and the necessary internal or other constraints they face. They don’t live in isolation; they need to follow and reflect the processes of their organizations.

If you’re a buyer and you issue an RFP, is this something you would be happy to complete yourself if you were on the other side? There should be a clear “Why” behind every question asked. If it doesn’t really matter, does it need to be included in the RFP? Chances are that at least half of all the questions asked in a standard RFP have no actual impact on evaluation and selection.

Will you accept my proposal?

It’s probably impossible to completely eliminate information asymmetry from the RFP process, but it should be minimized. Otherwise, it’s the fact of possessing some more information than other suppliers (as incumbents, or thanks to previous communications) that may be the deciding factor rather than the potential strength of the proposed solution.

Access to decision makers, and the possibility to ask in-depth questions with answers shared among all respondents, is a win-win. This doesn’t take away completely the detective work involved in trying to understand each question to get to the actual underlying issue, but it makes the process easier. And more information leads to better responses.

Most LSPs have adopted some type of sales methodology to manage “complex sales” that include multiple buyers, as is normal in language services. This includes customer-centric selling or strategic selling. And many LSPs have gone to great lengths to model their sales operations on these approaches, including to proposals. That means that using these sales methodologies stopped being a competitive advantage a long time ago. These days, it’s really about actual implementation and diligence, plus creativity.

From XLSX to S2P

Another way to make the RFP process more straightforward is to consider the file formats used. We may all love Excel, but let’s face it, it’s not an ideal tool for RFPs. It’s great for numbers but not for content (or terminology and translations, for that matter).

Quite a few LSPs have implemented some fairly robust SaaS solutions to help them manage RFPs and the whole process, which normally involves multiple collaborators and various SMEs. RFP management solutions like RFPIO or Loopio can make the whole process so much more effective.

Such tools help centralize the best RFP content and existing responses, maintain the single source of truth, automate RFP responses, and provide for some collaboration in the broader RFP response team.

They can also work reasonably well with Excel formats and others, but it doesn’t mean a greater use of more sophisticated SaaS solutions for managing RFPs and the submission of proposals on the buyer side wouldn’t help.

There are multiple existing options, and this may also be where the emerging source-to-pay (S2P) category of online procurement solutions may live up to its promise. S2P builds on the capabilities of platforms like Ariba and Coupa, and is supposed to be comprehensive by including sourcing, negotiating, contracting, and paying suppliers. It’s inherently digital, with a portal-based approach to managing RFPs, RFIs, quotes, or bids. Whether it will also make the process of buying language services easier remains to be seen at this stage.

Conclusion (of sorts)

At the end of the day, I think I do love RFPs. They help buyers select the best partner, and they inspire each supplier to become the best partner possible. They are a great tool of the market economy, and they help to match and balance supply and demand. Not only that, the way they’ve developed over the years shows the increasing importance localization plays in organizations.

And while there’s a lot that can be done to make them more effective, we, as LSPs, also need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and see how we can craft our responses better. What can we do at our end to make the whole RFP process more enjoyable and useful for buyers? Looks like a topic for another article!