Difference Between an RFI vs RFP for Federal Government Contracts

federal buyers follow a formal process for buying, it's called the acquisition process, acquisition lifecycle, but they follow a formal process for buying whatever they need, products and services, and it's really important for you to understand. I often get the question, what's the difference to an RFI and an RFP? And for the most part, people understand at a high level, but a little bit deeper down, what's the purpose, when do they use it, why are they using it, etc. That's what I want to dive into because knowing the difference between an RFI and an RFP is going to allow you to properly prepare to take advantage of both. When you think about an RFI coming out, which I'll explain in a minute, there's a different way that you're going to be able to take advantage of that particular point in time in the government buyers acquisition lifecycle. And the same thing where the RFP drops, how do you take advantage of that? What are you doing in there? And the idea that I want to just point out is, if you think about the RFP is D-Day, or all conversations, everything stops here, then the RFI is to the left of that. And so we call this shifting left. If you haven't heard this in government contract or in sales even, is that the RFP is like the last point. And so shifting left in the sales cycle allows you more influence. And when you talk about one of the major differences we're going to discuss today, RFIs and RFPs, you're shifting left. And the earlier you can get to a customer, the better chance you're going to win. And the earliest you can get to a customer is if you're so far to the left, you're the one giving them the idea of the need. You're helping them realize they have a problem. They call this problem aware or solution aware or things like this, but you're helping them understand they have a problem and then starting to talk to them about a solution. So when you think about RFP and RFIs, think about this line of shifting left. So we're going to dive into what's the difference between an RFI and an RFP in three different sections. I'm going to talk about each one of them, what is an RFI and what is an RFP. I just want to share some bullets to command. Like if I'm having a conversation with somebody, this is what I'm going to say to them. I'm not trying to quote the far. I'm not trying to be some government or legal way of speaking to it. I'm a salesperson. I'm a small business owner who's been a government contractor. I'm speaking to my friends about what is an RFI? What is an RFP? You and I, we're friends, right? And then last thing I want to wrap up with is it's one thing to know what an RFI or an RFP is, but what's the difference for responding to each one? And there's some tactics you want to pay attention to. I just want to give you some tips that I share with my customers. If you don't know who I am, my name is Neil McDonnell. I want to welcome you to my federal sales training where I provide tips for success in the federal market. I'm the president of the GovCon Chamber of Commerce, co-founder of GovCon in a box, where we align the AI-powered tools that go with all the teaching I've been doing in the GovCon Chamber. I spent 20 years in the federal market as a small business owner and since 2018, I've been teaching people like you that government contracting is not a secret, it's just a process. When we follow a process A to Z, we have repeatable, predictable results. This is what I want for you. It's why I do this training. Okay, so let's talk about what is an RFI. Fundamentally, it's request for information is what that acronym stands for. Another way of thinking about it is a sources sought notice. In fact, if you go to SAM, the official notice type is sources sought notice, but there's basically two types of sources sought notices. One is an RFI, which I'll talk about in a second. The other is a sources sought. Sources sought is generally where they're trying to find contractors like, "Hey, we're trying to find out if there's women of small businesses that are interested and will reply to this opportunity," and they wait to see if they get them. If they get enough responses from women of small businesses and a source of sought outreach, then they will consider setting it aside to a woman of small business. That's different. That's the acquisition side of the market research, if you will. A request for information, though, is where you're evaluating, and I've got it here on acquisition approach and technical options. The request for information is so much more valuable to me as a small business owner. If I was working with an agency, when they have a true request for information, what they're really trying to do is to reach out to industry and say, "We know we got this problem. We're not really sure of the direction. In fact, we're not even totally sure we've identified the problem correctly. We hear about AI. We know AI is out there, but we're just in the facility side of the house of our agency. Does AI fit into how we run our shop? If you haven't heard me say this before, AI fits everywhere. If you do flooring maintenance, that's an example, or bathroom maintenance, you can talk about how you can integrate an AI solution, just to find an AI company to work with you. Integrate an AI solution that'll help you lower the cost of maintenance and extend the life of the floor, of the elevator, of the paint on the walls, or whatever it is. You can use AI to help them really understand it. AI fits from cybersecurity down the floors we walk on to get to the cybersecurity room. Request for information is this discussion with industry about what do you think? It's the very earliest stage of market research. It's where they're evaluating technical options. If you think about the cloud, we want to go to the cloud. There's Google Cloud, there's Oracle Cloud, there's Microsoft Cloud, there's Amazon Web Services Cloud. There's these different cloud options. We're not an expert on it. Can you help us out? If you think about yourself in your own company right now, there's all these tools. There's at least 40 or 50 AI tool companies that use AI proposal, or are building AI proposal writing tools. We've got that on our backlog. There's 40 or 50 of them, but how do you evaluate the options? When the government is doing an outreach like this, what they're trying to do is say, "Come in and talk to me about the options." One of the best things you can do when you're talking to the customers is talk about options that are opposite of yours so you can shape their thinking in this early market stage of talking to them candidly about, "Hey, here's this option, which is ours, and here's this other option. Here's why our option is better." More importantly, here's how you should value it. This is the things you should think about. This is where you're basically maximizing the visibility and the importance of your strengths and minimizing your weaknesses or minimizing your competitor's weaknesses. These are things that can be done inside of an RFI response. The fifth bullet that I have here is what is an RFI. It's market research. I mentioned this earlier. When you think about the government's acquisition life cycle, it's a very formal process. You can reach in and talk to them and say, "Hey, can you give me a roadmap, a picture, an image of your acquisition life cycle?" It basically is just a process. The same way I teach there's a sales process, they have an acquisition process, how we sell, how they buy. Market research is a formal part of what they're doing. In there, it's guided by the FAR for the most part. It talks about how you can't just buy from your favorite. As a federal buyer, you can't just look and go, "Oh, I like John," or, "I like John's company," and buy from them. No, you have to do formal market research. Sometimes they do market research because they're not quite sure what to get. Other times, they do market research to be fair, to make sure they're giving all of industry a chance to come back and participate. The last bullet I have here is nothing is set in stone when it comes to an RFI. This is definitely a salesperson's piece of advice to you. You might talk to a contracting officer or something like that. They're like, "Oh, you got to do exactly what it says." No, you don't. You can do whatever you want. You're not going to jail if you don't respond exactly the same way. You do need to make sure it's compliant enough that they don't reject it. The whole point of what I'm talking about when I say it's not set in stone is that you don't need to talk to everything they put into the RFI. You need to talk to your strengths. You need to double down on that. Sometimes, the contracting officers are just going through this exercise, and they really haven't thought much out about it. When you take an RFI and you're going to respond to it, you want to make sure that is your response. I'll talk about this more in a minute in the response section. Just keep that in mind. Nothing is set in stone at this point because the government is still in market research. Their acquisition approach, the decisions they make on contract vehicle, NAICS code, set-asides, all of that is up for discussion. The contracting officer might have got pretty close to where they want to go, but all of it is up for discussion. If you can sway them with data and evidence of why they should go the direction you're thinking, same thing with technical options, if you can sway them into thinking, "Hey, you should go Google Cloud because it's blah, blah, blah," then it's better. I used to do this in my last company where I would sway them to not use another customer relationship management tool, a CRM tool. Don't use this other one you think about. Instead, use SharePoint because we are SharePoint experts. Use SharePoint. You guys already own the license. We will just come in. You don't have to pay any more for software, which you would over here, but we can just help you use the tool you have. They're like, "Oh, that's a good idea. We'll have to get more license." If you know what you offer and you know how it aligns to their needs and you can make the case for why your options are the best, during market research, you can sway all of their decisions. I don't mean trick them. I mean sway them with data and evidence. I'll talk about that more actually in the response. Contrast that with what is an RFP, a request for proposal. I put it a little farther down that you might hear a request for quote. The big difference between a request for proposal and a request for quote is how much the government already knows about the need or the solution. We'll come back to that in a minute. A request for proposal is a solicitation going out there. Again, I put my caveat on. I'm not trying to be a far expert. I'm not trying to come at this as a contractor. I'm starting coming at this from a salesperson, small business owner, business developer, capture person, proposal writer, writing for the win. It's a solicitation for services or product from you. The government is looking for something. In this case, it's almost always services. They're putting out this need and saying, "I need to come in and tell me what you're doing." I did a whole separate training earlier this week on what's the difference between an RFQ and an RFP. Maybe someone will put the link into the chat, but either way, you can watch the replay. Fundamentally, a request for quote tends to be more about price because they know what they want. For example, we have a help desk. It needs 10 people. We want you to give us a quote. You might be able to talk about how you can do the best customer service running that help desk, but it doesn't really matter because when it comes down to it, price is going to be king generally in RFQs, request for quotes. In a request for proposal, what is king or queen in this particular case is your technical approach. How are you addressing their need? That's a really important thing with a request for proposal. The government is pretty darn clear about the requirement, the need we have. They just aren't that clear about the technical approach. They're going to evaluate company A, company B, company C's technical approach and see how much those approaches align to that need together with how much are you understanding it, et cetera. Then they definitely pay attention to price, they definitely pay attention to experience past performance. The key in this particular case is aligning to the government's definition of need which they put into the RFP. By the way, that's what bullet number four means. The RFP is a clear statement of need. This is our need. How are you going to solve it? I talk about here that the response is the seller's cost and approach. That's the main thing about it, and it's the key thing in there. The last bullet is everything is set in stone. When you get to an RFP, there's no more discussion. They may say, hey, you can submit questions by such and such date, but there's no more talking to the government. Anybody in the government who talks to you when an RFP or an RFQ is dropped is wrong. They should all be saying, sorry, I can't answer any questions. All questions must be in there. They're not being mean. They're being fair. You don't want them talking to your competitors when the RFP drops. During market research, before the RFP drops, all is fair. But when the RFP drops, the government needs to be very fair about it. First off, just because that's the right thing to do. Second off, if they're not fair, then there could be protests. What a protest means, all things separate, is it delays the need that the government has being solved. This is why the government often seems closed, et cetera. Just take it for what it is. They're just trying to be fair. But everything is set in stone when that RFP drops. That means there it is. Respond to it. Before I move on to the response and how you respond, I just want to remind you and invite you to join our virtual government networking. We did this last week. We did it in September. We're doing another one October 28th. You can go into my LinkedIn profile to register right there. Or if it's easier for you to remember, all on my page right now or what you can see is galconinobox.com/networking. If you go there, there's a button there that you can click on that'll lead you to where you register. But come join us. It's a great time to meet with other people. In my lives, you can chat. But in the networking event, we put you in rooms with like seven other people, six other people, so you guys can talk and meet people for 10 minutes and then meet another group of people, another group of people. It's a great way to do it. Every time I do these, I hear back from people who have met folks, who've learned things, and who have scheduled meetings for that week. I hope to have you there with us. Just cruising along because we have 10 minutes left. Let's talk about the response differences between RFIs and RFPs. The first thing that I have here is when you're responding to an RFI, you're letting the government know you want to do this work, or at least you like a portion of the work and you want to participate. We call this an expression of interest. You can call it 100 other things, right? But you're just expressing interest to the government in written form that, hey, I want to work with you. And the more you give them, the more that expression of interest has value. For example, if you're a GSA contract holder, you can just go into GSA and hit the interest button. Yeah, you can do that, but that's not a lot. Or you can respond to give them a basic capability statement. It's a little bit more expression of interest, but it's still not a lot. But when you respond with five or 10 pages to an expression or with an expression of interest to an RFI, now they really know that you want to support them. And to be candid or face reality, you come up in value over the person who just hit the button. All right, so in an RFI, you want to provide information. You're providing information back to the government. I talk about data and evidence that can sway them in the direction you want. Part of it is to inform them, but keep in mind, this is a sales step. I'm not here to just do good work for the government for free. In fact, they're not allowed to take things from me for free. So I need to balance teaching them about the direction or the approach I want to go while just providing information that will hopefully sway them in the direction I want. So an example is, let's say in software development, there's something called CMMI, capability maturity model index, CMMI level two, level three or whatever. And I might provide information that talks about the value of having that or not having it. In there, I'm trying to share ideas. I'm trying to get them to think about their needs in a different way. It's like, yeah, I see where your needs are, but actually some of our other customers or the trend throughout the commercial side, because government wants to know what's going on in industry or the commercial side as well, the trend is this. And I recommend you consider that. So I'm sharing ideas and I'm also sharing my capabilities. And you'll see a similar thing in the RFP response. The responses typically are smaller, like let's say five or 10 pages. Sometimes they say unlimited, but usually you're talking about five or 10 pages for the average RFI response. And the response can be more, it doesn't have to be compliant so much. It can be more of a general discussion of what you think would be of value to the government while they're in this market research phase. Of course, there's a level of compliance you have to do. There's a basic level. When I say don't be so locked in stone with what they say is, this is a market research tool. I have one more business with RFIs than I have with RFPs. And I haven't lost like a ton of RFPs so the odds are different. It's because whenever I wrote to an RFI, I always wrote to my core competency. When we wrote, our company was obviously the expert. The buyer didn't see a sales process going on. They saw a trusted advisor that they could invite in and say, hey, why don't you come in? That's where the last bullet it says leads to discussions, right? When you write an RFI, it's leading to a discussion compared to when you write an RFP, it leads to an award. Different things. And so I want to write my RFI in a way that is encouraging or motivating these people to say, let me bring these guys in and talk to them more about what they're saying in here. There's a different thing with sources sought, right? When it's just so, are you a woman on small business? Do you do this next go? That's all boring. It's just checklist stuff. But a true RFI is this discussion between a buyer and seller. That's sales. That's an understanding of the needs and the possible solutions that can go with those needs. Last bullet I had, which is the second to last one here, is in an RFI response, you're sharing experiences in there. You don't necessarily have to share past performances. Anytime you see past performances being required by the government, it is the government abusing industry. They should not be requiring all this formal past performance because that's literally what an RFP is. And so when they sit there and ask you to fill out those forms to do all that extra work that typically is in an RFP, it's missing. But the value of experience of past performances in an RFI is you can tell it more in a case study format. So in this story, it's a little harder to tell the story as much in a formal past performance table or something. One thing I put here in the red box is when you write an RFI response, you want to write for the win. I said that I won more RFIs than I did RFPs. I won more contracts off an RFI than an RFP. It was because we wrote to one thing, Microsoft SharePoint. That's what we were good at. And when we responded to an RFI, we were able to provide solid examples. So one example is I want to migrate from an old version to a new version. Well, we wouldn't just say we could do that. We're like, "Hey, here's an example, migration plan." And then we would take a real migration plan, change the information, and put in like that customer's information. People would say, "Oh, aren't you worried about them just taking it and doing it themselves?" It's like, first, who cares? If they took it, they're not going to work with us anyways. But second, now I just push my competitors out because the CIO looks at it and goes, "Oh my God, that's exactly what I need." Right? Why don't we bring these people in? What do you mean a direct award? What's that or something, right? And so when you write for the win, you're not writing to the discussion and, "Hey, I'll go for the win in the RFP." Go for the win in the sources sought in the RFI. It doesn't mean you're always going to get it, but you're certainly going to put much better quality in the RFI response than typically is done by your competitors. Okay, so let's talk about the... So that was the RFI. What's the response difference with RFPs? So at the very beginning here, I put RFPs are this compliance exercise. And I like to say every one of your competitors for the most part is going to be compliant, right? I mean, there is this suggestion that you do want to respond sometimes, even if you feel like maybe you're not totally going to win. But if it's in your sweet spot and you respond, sometimes your competitors forget to do 25 pages and they put in 30 pages because they messed it up or something, or they come an hour late or something. So you want to make sure you're dealing with a compliance side, but we're all going to be basically compliant. And so RFPs are a compliance exercise compared to an RFI is a persuasion exercise, if you will. In an RFP, the government has clearly stated their need. And so our response is going to clearly state a solution. That's a solution we call a technical approach. Sometimes it might be a set of products and services together. But it is this combination of your technical approach and your management approach, not trying to use fancy proposal terms. But those are the basic things in order to succeed on a contract, right? Is how are you going to do the work and how are you going to manage that work to make sure it gets done correctly? And so all that language that goes in. And so you're providing a solution in an RFP, where in an RFI, you're discussing a lot more about the things, the problems they should be thinking about. And in RFP, you tend not to want to be, you could balance some suggestions of risks and how they should consider it and then how you would manage it as a way to get them to see what your competitors aren't even noticing those risks. But generally, you don't want to introduce a lot of new things. You want to just introduce your solution. They're longer. So sometimes they, if I said five to 10 pages for an RFI, they can be 10 or 50 pages, well, north of 50 pages. But they're longer and they're very specific, right? You can't wing it like I talk about with an RFI. We could do a lot more of what you want. In an RFP, you need to make sure you're specifically responding to what they ask about, because that's a checklist exercise. I call it a compliance exercise. The past performances, they're formal process, not the stories so much. I like to weave the stories into the narrative of an RFP response, but I still have to have that formal past performance. And I said it already leads to selections. The kicker for me, I describe RFP responses in four Cs, right? When you look at your response, it needs to be clear, compliant, compelling, and convincing. And I love it when sometimes people take what I teach and just keep the words, but they don't understand the meanings behind it, right? Clear needs to be easy to understand. If it's this convalent, if you hand it to a 10-year-old and they don't want to read some of it, if you hand it to an adult and they just really grudgingly turn the page, then that's already a sign it's not that clear. It's probably just packed. It needs to be compliant, obviously. It needs to be compelling, saying, "Hey, oh my God, that's exactly what I think we need." And then the convincing is you need to convince me that that dream you just told me about, of a technical approach or your solution, that dream is compelling, but can you convince me that you're the company to do it? And so clear, compliant, compelling, and convincing is something to pay attention to. I just ran out of time. I just want to leave you with a couple of things to remember, three things to remember. First off, remember the acquisition life cycle. RFIs are the start of that acquisition life cycle for the most part, right? It's formal market research. The third bullet here is that RFPs, it's the buyer asking for help. So make sure you're communicating back to them with your proposal that, yeah, we are not only providing you the right solution, but we're convincing you that we've done it before and you'll be okay. As you move through your day, just remember government contracting, it is not a secret. It's just a process. I will see you in the next training.