The 3 Questions to Ask When Creating Your Contract Management RFP

We continue our webinar series “Pulling Back the Curtain: Things You Ought to Know When Choosing a CLM Partner and a Solution” with Part 3, “Avoiding RFP Pitfalls: What You Do and Don’t Need”. This time we are looking at the sometimes thorny topic of the RFP.

The RFP process can be tricky and has tripped up plenty of seasoned professionals. Unfortunately, it is all too easy to turn the RFP into a wish list that doesn’t really capture the essence of what you need as a company. Between unnecessary features and overreaching on timeline, RFPs are full of potential landmines that can derail a critical overhaul of how you manage your contracts.

This webinar challenges you to ask yourself three key questions as you craft your RFP:

• Is this useful and necessary?
• What is the actual process from start to finish?
• Is what I’ve been told true?

Our contract management veterans – Stephanie Corey, Co-Founder of Uplevel Ops, Matt Patel, COO of Malbek, and Teju Deshpande, CEO of Oya Solutions, all of whom have all been part of numerous RFPs, discuss the traps that contracting professionals can fall into and guide listeners to think outside the box when drafting an RFP.

If you’re just discovering this webinar series now, be sure to go back to the beginning. You can find Part 1 here: “Signs You Might Have a Contract Management Challenge”.

In this clip from the webinar, we talk about how it’s really easy, after seeing some amazing product features, to jam-pack the RFP with all of them, regardless of how useful or necessary they are to your particular organization. 

"What happens when people pick a solution or look for a solutions in their researching, you almost end up with remembering the best features and functionality across several platforms and then you make a wish list based on, “I like the clause library in that tool,” and “I like the AI software in this one,” and “I like the ability to redline automatically or Word editor in something else.” And so you create sort of a wish list or list of items that are not necessarily aligned with what your organization wants but a combination of what you’ve seen in multiple tools. And what that results in is it may or may not meet your core needs as an organization. So you want to start first by saying what is the minimum viable product that I need in the next twelve months? What is important? What is absolutely critical and what is it that I can live without? So in that example a lot of times people will say I want the ability to automatically extract my contracts. However, a lot of times when people start with looking at a contract management solution, they don’t even have their contracts in one place. So for AI to work properly, you actually need to have a centralized repository or contract that you can report off of. So it’s important, I think, to have a list of what is important for the next twelve months. What is actually a priority for your different groups? Because there are needs in different parts of the organization that might be conflicting with one another. So what legal wants might be very different from what procurement wants. And it’s important, for example, to have that alignment on the front end before issuing an RFP," Teju Deshpande, Oya Solutions.