How to assess your vendors objectively
There’s still one more step to tackle before you can jot everything down: establishing the criteria for objectively assessing each vendor’s proposal fairly.
Here’s why this is important. Although we think we can be objective in how we evaluate different solutions, as humans, we are highly subjective beings by nature. Our preferences, our biases, our misunderstandings, our personal needs—and well beyond—can cloud our judgment. This is why you need to create a rubric or scorecard that allows you to assign an objective, numerical value or grade to each section of the vendor proposals that you will review.
By now, you will have already outlined clear expectations for what information the proposal should include, what format it should be in, and other pertinent details helping vendors understand your expectations. This doesn’t mean vendors can’t go above and beyond in their proposals. By all means, let them flex their creative muscles and show off a bit. Even so, baseline criteria need to be established in advance to ensure that all vendors are being held to the same standards and are aware of the criteria that they will be graded against.
The only difference is that now you’re the teacher, and you’re doing the job of grading each vendor on the strength of their proposals. As you evaluate each vendor, your evaluation criteria might look something like this:
0 points: Did not meet requirements
1 point: Partially meets requirements
2 points: Mostly meets requirements
3 points: Fully meets requirements
4 points: Exceeds requirements
You’ll want to give each member of the RFP team a rubric to fill out as they review each vendor proposal. At the end of each presentation—whether you’re having them do a formal pitch or after you’ve independently reviewed each submission—every RFP team member should calculate the average of the points allocated in order to calculate a final “grade.”
Once this has been done, it’s time to come back together as a team to discuss how each of you evaluated a given vendor proposal. At the end of this discussion, you’ll need to take an average of everyone’s individual scores to land on a final grade for each vendor.
