The association that represents trade show exhibitors and its counterpart representing the companies that design, build and manage exhibit booths have joined to devise best practices for the requests for information (RFIs) that exhibitors send to suppliers.
The initiative, by the Trade Show Exhibitors Association and Exhibit Designers and Producers Association, marks the latest meetings industry effort to grapple with the recent trend of corporations imposing uniform procurement policies on meetings and marketing.
The RFIs that exhibitors send design companies often fall woefully short in helping exhibitors determine which design companies they can best work with, and vice versa, according to C. Alan Cordial, head of the joint TSEA-EDPA task force and principal of Calan Communications, a Cheswick, Pa.-based software company that develops applications for exhibit suppliers.
"RFIs are frequently onerous in length and off-target in their questions," asserted Cordial. "The process is broken, and that benefits neither the corporate buyer nor suppliers."
The large sums that design companies must spend to compete for business lie at the root of the task force's focus on RFIs rather than requests for proposals (RFPs), according to Cordial.
RFIs seek information about a company, its business practices and operations; RFPs seek bids on specific jobs. Exhibitors typically invite a fairly large number of design companies to submit RFIs and then whittle down the number for the RFP round of selection.
Absent an effective RFI process, exhibitors may invite design companies to submit RFPs for jobs which the companies have little chance of winning, Cordial said.
Design companies typically spend about $30,000, and often $100,000 or more, to submit booth designs as part of their RFPs, so they want assurances that they have a reasonable opportunity of winning the business before committing significant resources to the RFP effort, he said.
Complicating the situation, many RFIs ask questions that pertain to traditional areas of corporate procurement but are irrelevant to exhibit booth design and production, according to Cordial. For example, an RFI may ask about failure rates per thousand items.
"They're pulling questions out of boilerplate in RFIs that apply to capital goods instead of customer service," he said.
On the other hand, some exhibitors ask questions that at best indirectly indicate whether a design company is a good fit for the exhibitor. For example, Cordial said one question on an RFI asked the design company to select the cartoon character that portrays it best.
"That's not the way to ask the question to get what you need to know," said Cordial. "If you want to know something about a creative company, you have to ask about its philosophy, methodology and discipline."
The task force plans to submit its recommendations for approval to both association boards in early December, and release a completed set of guidelines next spring.