One of the biggest headaches for software companies of all sizes is the creation of RFPs. RFPs are labor intensive, exhaustive and exhausting efforts to tout the product. The effort to produce RFPs can be a drain on precious resources in Sales, Marketing, and Engineering. And Product Managers get involved more often than they wish they did.

The blood, sweat and tears expended on an RFP is all the more frustrating because you’re left in doubt about whether it really makes any difference in winning the sale. Often the RFP is a cruel exercise in jumping through hoops for a prospect that is using you as “column fodder.” You’re column fodder if your purpose is to provide a point of comparison, a systematic review with the pretense of objectivity that only serves to back up an emotional decision, made long ago, to go with a product they like - somebody else’s product.

Yet despite what they tell people in sales training, you can’t exactly blow off the whole RFP process and still hope to win a sale. While it’s up to the sales rep to make sure that you have not been selected as column fodder, your company must create an RFP that:

Stands out from the others,

Demonstrates the uniqueness of your product,

Wins over the doubters, and

Gets you to the next step in the sales process.

So if you’ve got to do RFPs, how can you make the whole experience a little less painful? How can you streamline the process so that fewer resources are spent on what is arguably an ineffective way to make a sale? Read on for some guidelines to focus the RFP process.