A sales rep brought in a request-for-quote (RFQ) from a local municipality. When these types of bids come out, the government affords access to the previous contract terms, pricing, and conditions; when the RFQ is awarded, you also receive bid results.
There really isn’t much to preparing a RFQ like this: take your current cost, add a minimum margin, compare it to the previous pricing, and send the bid off. With this particular piece of business, we had won the bid in the last cycle; we took it from a competitor who had it for several previous cycles.
On this bid, however, we lost. And to think, the bidding agency had the audacity to tell us how poorly our competitor serviced their account the last time they had the business!
... to continue reading you must be subscribed
