Do you bid on the RFPs you write?

No. If we develop your solicitation, we are ineligible to respond to it, and that is written into the engagement letter rather than offered as a courtesy. This is standard organizational conflict of interest practice, and it is the reason our recommendations on scope and licensing carry no financial interest in the outcome.

We already have a draft. Can you just review it?

Yes, and the first review is free. We return a written requirements gap analysis identifying where vendors will diverge in their interpretation, which requirements will get priced as assumptions, and where your evaluation criteria will fail to separate the field. If you want us to rewrite from there, the fee applies from Stage 1.

How is this different from hiring a proposal consultant?

A proposal consultant produces a well-structured document about requirements they cannot evaluate. We have delivered roughly 150 Salesforce projects a year, which means we know that “integrate with our ERP” is eleven different projects at eleven different prices, and we write the requirement at the level that makes bids comparable. The document quality is table stakes. The technical judgment is the service.

Will you bias the RFP toward Salesforce?

If you have not yet chosen a platform, we are the wrong firm for that decision and we will say so. We are a Salesforce partner. Our value begins once the platform decision is made and the question becomes what to build, how to license it, and which implementer to trust. Bringing us in earlier than that puts a thumb on a scale that should be neutral.

What happens if our procurement is delayed, extended, or reissued?

Delays and extensions cost you nothing. The engagement window is stated in the package and runs from kickoff regardless of what your calendar does inside it. If the solicitation is formally cancelled and reissued as a new procurement, that is scoped as a new engagement, since it is a second full evaluation effort rather than a delay.

Who owns the documents?

You do, outright, delivered in editable source format. We retain no license, no template claim, and no right to reuse your requirements with another client. For public agencies, this also means the work product is yours to release under public records law without consulting us.

Will you work within our procurement office’s rules and template?

Yes. We write to your format, your clause library, and your approval chain. We do not ask agencies to adopt our template, because the document has to survive your legal review and your award has to survive a protest, and neither of those is helped by an unfamiliar structure.

Does your team score the responses, or do we?

You do. Scoring authority stays with your evaluation committee in every engagement, because an award scored by an outside party is a protest waiting to happen. We build the instrument, train the evaluators, produce the requirement-by-requirement technical analysis your committee scores against, and facilitate consensus. The scores are theirs.

Can we hire you to implement the project afterward?

Not the project you solicited, for the reason above. We can be engaged for unrelated work, and many clients bring us back for a separate scope once the awarded vendor is delivering. If your primary goal is to have us implement, do not engage us to write the RFP, and we will tell you that in the first conversation.

How does a public agency actually buy this?

Most agencies procure Requirements Definition directly, since the fee typically falls below the threshold that triggers competitive solicitation for professional services, then run the larger procurement the work defines. Where it does not, we respond to your solicitation for advisory services like any other bidder. We are also familiar with cooperative purchasing vehicles and can tell you in one call which path is cleanest for your jurisdiction.