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That’s the experience of some meeting pro- fessionals on the other side of the table as well. “The constant comment I get from salespeople is, ‘This electronic RFP system — the problem is it’s making it transactional. It’s taking away our ability to get to meet the customer,’” Dominguez said. “When I hear that, I call everybody on it. I say, ‘Look, if you’re waiting to build a relationship till when you got the lead, you’re too late.’ “This is my problem. I think people make it become the crutch to say, ‘They’re keeping me from my customers.’ No, that is not quite accurate, because in my experience with StarCite and Cvent, they will get me to my end user. They will tell me which customers are using my hotels. I can build relationships with them.” While acknowledging that the online-RFP

Indeed, the larger hotel chains have standard operating procedures for dealing with RFPs that can help keep them in check by rigorously track- ing every input. “Marriott has identified response times to customer RFPs as part of its Service Standards,” Nostrand said. “Times are based on arrival dates and group size. For example, 50 peak group rooms arriving within three months will get an RFP back from Marriott within five busi- ness hours. As the number of hotels on the RFP increase, the time/standard increases to allow for research and proposal generation.” That helps, but it doesn’t mitigate the problem

Dave Nostrand

‘Customers feel that if they source more hotels, it will improve their RFP response rate. This practice can sometimes actually delay response times.’

completely. And it doesn’t get at another complaint about eRFPs: They reduce or eliminate human interaction from the sales process. “I consider myself kind of an old-school planner,” Schultz said. “I’ve been doing this for 17 years. Back when I started there [were many] more one-on-one relationships with your hotel venue or with your national sales manager who oversaw your project.” For planners who have never known life without eRFPs and weren’t trained in the tradition of call- ing up a sales contact, “I don’t think you would think that that’s an option, because we’re so ‘this is how you do the RFP, and you do it through the computer and you send it in online.’ And what we’re seeing is a loss of the interrelationships.”

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process is not without flaws, providers such as Elite Meetings and Cvent stress that they’ve built human contact into their systems. Elite has an in-platform messaging system, for example, that allows planners and salespeople to communicate directly. Beyond that, “We provide all of the con- tact information [for each venue] to the planner,” Elite’s Foy said. “It’s up to the planner to indicate to the hotel in our system how they want to be contacted.… This is all about the face-to-face, and our whole mantra is, let’s introduce the right buyer to the right supplier and let’s get the heck out of the way.” Cvent likewise incorporates a variety of touch points into its platform, including client-services assistance for meeting professionals navigating the process, as well as built-in “metrics and mea- sures” designed to educate product users. “We don’t feel comfortable being in the position to tell a planner or a hotel what they should respond to, how many venues you should send it to,” Malhotra said, “because we are a technology that has been built to get [someone] to use hopefully in the most appropriate way possible.” In other words, you have to let people figure out if and when they need to talk to one another

— which is how Sharon Collins, CMP, SMMC, stra- tegic meeting partner for the American Cancer Society, prefers to operate. “We find that when we get to our short list [of venues after sending out an eRFP],” Collins said, “… it’s then that we’re reach- ing out to say, ‘Okay, do you have flexibility on this,’ or ‘Tell me what space you have secured for our event,’ and then we’ll do a space analysis.… We

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