RFP Insights - Power Your Business to Win - YouTube

Welcome to BidPrime in Austin Texas I'm Bill Culhane along with BidPrime's

co-founder Steven Hetzel exciting times here at BidPrime us the company

approaches the eighth anniversary Stephen what's the big announcement

we're launching RFP insights RFP insights is a new tool that our clients

will have in order to submit more effective proposals in win more

government bids why did BidPrime decide to offer this service I talk to clients

every day and a lot of clients have actually asked us to fill out these

foils for them these public information requests they thought that if they had

certain information the award information or maybe the proposal the

incumbent winner had or the contract terms or even the scoring criteria that

the government agency had they thought that they would have had a leg up in

winning and responding to RFPs we've gone out and met with a number of

clients also visited with some of the experts in this field David Schneider is

an expert on FOIA Marsha Matson from Mayor Brown of course friend of ours

John Hanson who continually discusses transparency in government there's a lot

of information out there in terms of RFP insights what information is included a

lot of information so the award information it's very important that's

easy to get sometimes online through Google through bid prime through your

account manager there's also the tabulation data the scoring criteria so

sometimes RFPs especially are not exactly the lowest bidder it's it's a

more qualitative assessment you could get a peak sometimes at their actual

proposal there are a number of other companies other businesses in our

industry who have a similar product but as far as the process itself kind of

walk us through the details there are two scenarios where our clients could

benefit from this so so we have let's just say that there's an active RFP that

comes out it's issued in real time from our database on bid Prime on an alert

they get the RFP you want to see who had this contract was there a previous

vendor see do a research request see is there an incumbent contract

she owned this and then if so who has it who won it how much was it for what was

the the original scoring criteria three years ago maybe when the actual contract

was filled what was the actual proposal that that winning vendor submitted so we

can actually file that request those are really time sensitive because these

requests sometimes take 10 20 30 or more days and an RFP may have a 30 day

response time so that's like scenario one the second scenario is for a RFP

that one of our clients submitted a proposal for and they did not win and

they want to see who won what do they want it for what were the final contract

terms so the contract terms sometimes may differ from the actual RFP and

sometimes that's a reason for a dispute or for it may be a challenge to the

award finally they want to see the actual proposal from the vendor that won

that RFP and that is really valuable to see what did they write what terms did

they write that helped them win so maybe our client can learn the next time they

actually respond to an RFP similar to this they can learn from what that

entity did in order to win there are differences between FOIA and then you

have the 50 states across the United States and each one have their own

subtle differences when it comes to requests for information I don't want

you to go through all the 50 states but what are some of the key differences

well there's there's a big difference between FOIA and Public Information Act

FOIA requests oftentimes is a lot more expensive so the processing fees may be

in the thousands of dollars $20,000 there's a lot of of exorbitant fees and

delays associated with the FOIA request for the federal side with the Public

Information Act for every single state every state does vary some states

require you to actually be a citizen of the state to actually submit the request

so if you are based in Iowa and you're trying to bid on something in Kentucky

you have to find somebody in Kentucky to actually submit that so that some states

are really easy you know I file a number of FOIA requests public information

requests and the state level and some of them respond in a day or two and some of

them respond the last possible time or some of them respond with maybe

additional fees or it may be $300 or $500

in copying fees and we can always dispute that we can always you know

scale back there the nature of the request there's a number of ways that we

can do to kind of meet a certain budget but every state every entity is slightly

different who are the people at bid prime who are going to help make RFP

insights happen our account managers are very well versed in navigating

government websites so they help our clients every day avoid having to pay

these fees sometimes these ridiculous sign up processes that they have but we

we have developed relationships with public information experts so these

experts are actually on the ground some of these cases I've told you we have to

actually be on site we've streamlined the process for our clients we have

developed these relationships with entities with law firms that can

actually submit this at a lower cost and it is for our clients to actually have

an attorney file this on their own a couple of times Steven over the course

of our conversation I've heard you use the word anonymity why is anonymity

important it's important to our clients it's something that they've asked for

specifically as we were developing this product the government agency will never

know the actual identity of who is requesting this so it'll all appear from

bid Prime and that's something that they thought was very valuable and that's

because it's a number of things maybe they don't want other vendors to know

that they have this information but then also it's a qualitative assessment you

submit your RFP and you're making the government sometimes do extra work and I

understand it may be that the vendor doesn't want to be perceived as negative

you know negatively having an advantage or having some extra information that

gave them that advantage where maybe they can score it differently on the

qualitative assessment so how do clients go about taking advantage of RFP

insights I recommend contacting your Account

Manager contacting our support team seeing if there is an incumbent actually

out there or if you did not win the RFP maybe you want to find that information

out so you can contact your account manager and figure out B the terms of

the information we also have a chat system we have multiple messaging

systems we have direct access by phone so we don't hide from our clients we

want you to call us and request this will also develop more streamlined

methods to obtain this information and request this information as more clients

use this service what are the cost and fees associated

with RFP insights the cost is $7.99 seven hundred ninety-eight dollars for

non clients and bit prime so if you're not a client that's what it is

but we've reduced the costs for our clients to where we're actually not

doing this to to profit from it we're just trying to do it as a service to

make sure that our clients are successful so we're offering that at

half the cost for $399 per requests that includes any information up to the

following it's the the award information the tabulations the scoring criteria

used by the agency the final contract terms including payments made over the

last 12 or 24 months if there was one if it's if there was an incumbent winner

and even the proposal that the winning vendor previously issued for this cost

of $399 for our clients for this request bid prime we'll pay up to two hundred

dollars in the processing fees and if it goes over that we'll certainly let our

clients know and we'll communicate that but that's a rarity we'll dispute it if

necessary if we think it's exorbitant we'll do all that for our clients at

$399 so there you have it RFP insights is on the way

on behalf of Steven and everyone here at BidPrime we sure do appreciate you

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