CMP SERIES CERTIFICATION MADE POSSIBLE

that personal connection, that personal relation- ship. I feel for suppliers, because they are now so inundated. Staffing has been reduced all across the board, and I think suppliers now are feeling the burden of having to respond to a lot more RFP requests, a lot more planners, and a lot more cli- ents than they used to.”

Which brings us back to Dominguez’s belief that the eRFP is just one more aspect of an on- demand world — that “we’ve trained the customer [to expect that] they can get whatever they want and they can get it now. If they want to do a search in 12 different cities, guess what — they can do it. We need to figure out how to work through that process.” But that doesn’t mean you abandon the core values of the meetings and hospitality indus- try. “We need to get salespeople out from behind their desk and going to meet our customers,” Dominguez said. “We need to be on the road much more frequently, we need to be with our custom- ers much more frequently, because at the end of the day, this business is still about relationships.

“I can’t stress enough, if people are waiting until they get the RFP to try to build a relation- ship, they’re too late in the game,” he said. “You should’ve been building that relationship with our customer ahead of time. [The eRFP] is a dis- tribution method. It is not an opportunity for us to build relationships. It is their distribution of a lead. That has nothing to do with the relation- ship you should’ve already been building with the customer.”

. Christopher Durso is executive editor of Convene. + ON THE WEB

Download the Convention Industry Council’s new APEX RFP Workbook — which includes Excel templates for a variety of meeting and event RFPs — at convn.org/ apex-rfp.

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