The new year doesn’t just mean a chance for friends and family to celebrate. A lot of organizations and institutions mark the new year with a  celebration I call “burning through the budget.” That liminal period between Christmas Day and New Year’s Eve can be a busy time as organizations put out a flurry of RFQs — requests for quotations.

Since the last week of December and the first two weeks of January, I’ve seen a notable uptick in the tempo of organizations posting RFQs, especially from government departments. As a consequence, I find myself spending time supporting my B2B dealers as they put together their bid packages. My side of it is mostly about lead times, logistics and, of course, price. Sometimes I’ll be asked to make specific product recommendations, but most of the time, my dealers have a handle on that. They know what they’ll need — they just need to know when I can get it to them.

Many RFQs are straightforward — the client knows what they want, and it’s down to price, especially with government agencies where the contract will be awarded to the lowest bidder. That is that.

They can also ask for much more detail, with points being awarded to prospective vendors based on things like payment terms, change order policies, after-delivery technical support or other things. In theory, RFQs are pretty straightforward. In practice, however, they can be complicated.

The first thing that comes to mind is that, upon occasion, the people at the client organization who’ve posted the RFQ don’t actually know what they want. Or, what they want isn’t totally appropriate for what they want to achieve. At least here in Alberta, the government procurement system is fully integrated, and there’s a formal Q&A process between the time the RFQ is posted and its closing date. Interested vendors can query the team that posted the RFQ and ask for more detail and clarification. Then the questions and answers are publicly posted.

It’s rare, but I have seen some Q&As posted where it becomes clear to those who posted the RFQ that they were premature and should have done more homework before asking for formal bids. Occasionally RFQs are withdrawn and reposted later once changes have been amended.

Other RFQs can just be … out there. In one case, one of my dealers brought a particularly complex RFQ to my attention. To put it politely, the asks in the RFQ were disproportionate to the size of the opportunity. In that instance, reading the publicly posed Q&As was entertaining. Every question from interested vendors, when you read between the lines of the polite business-speak, were variations of, “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

Another issue that interested vendors need to be aware of is that timelines can be long. RFQs will have a closing date, after which no further submissions will be accepted. The period after, where the buyer evaluates the bids and makes their decision, can vary widely in how long it takes.

One RFQ I supported a dealer with had a closing date in August of last year. The client didn’t make a final decision on who they awarded the contract to until the second week of January of this year. Five months is unusually long, at least for the kinds of contracts my dealers are chasing. But, two to three months is common.

Putting together bid packages is time-consuming, often requiring quite a bit of effort with no clear odds of success. Yet, as Wayne Gretzky put it so well, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”