LMGTFY: RFP Research

LMTGTFY stands for “Let Me Google That For You.” It’s also a website.

This 5 minute introduction into google – is probably worth as much to me as my graduate degrees.

It all about the Search Operators

There are a lot of very good search operators (and a lot of very good articles on search operators).

• Google Search Operators: The Complete List (42 Advanced Operators) by Joshua Hardwick on ahrefs.com
• Google Search Opertaors on moz.com
• An SEO Guide to Advanced Search Operators by Brian Harnish on searchenginejournal.com

RFP Research Tips

1. ABG – always be googling
2. start wide to learn relevant terms -> narrow
3. use “common modifiers” like ( top | best | list ) to get to research/posts on more than one thing

Useful Operators for RFP Research

1. ( item1 | item2 | item3 | “item 4” )
   1. What it does: item1 OR item2 OR item3 or item 4 (exact match for item 4)
   2. the pipe character is OR
   3. the ( ) is a group
2. (item1 | item2) AND item3
   1. it includes an OR statement on item1 & item2 while creating a requirement to also have item 3
      1. item1 with item3
      2. item2 with item3
3. inurl: 
4. site:
5. filetype:

Sample RFP Research Queries

Clearly this is a process that we’ll be using a lot at this site to build up a list of RFP questions for different software categories. Today let’s start with CRM software.

I always like to start software research by looking for documents someone else has put together.

(templates | examples | samples) AND ("customer relationship management software RFP" | CRM RFP) AND (filetype:pdf | filetype:xlsx | filetype:pptx)

That query can be broken down into 3 parts:

1. (templates | examples | samples) 
2. (“customer relationship management software RFP” | CRM RFP)
3. (filetype:pdf | filetype:xlsx | filetype:pptx)

What we’ve done is taken 3 types of queries that we know may provide value and combined them into a mega query. You’d be shocked what you can find this way.

Let’s see what types of results we get:

The next part of research involves click those links & reading them, but also evaluating the domains for their ability to provide more information. I happen to click on a few of these links and bidnet.com directly opened a pdf. I liked the pdf (ironically for the wrong type of software). I figured I can refine a search for bidnet.

site:bidnet.com ("customer relationship management software RFP" | CRM RFP) (filetype:pdf | filetype:xlsx | filetype:pptx)

This query can also be broken down into 3 parts:

1. site:bidnet.com
2. (“customer relationship management software RFP” | CRM RFP)
3. (filetype:pdf | filetype:xlsx | filetype:pptx)

Coming Soon: CRM RFP Question Starter Set

Since we used CRM as the example for the LMGTFY kick-off blog post. We’ll start to compile a good set of references for a CRM RFP before evaluating some CRM Vendors.