Friends of ours (not the Soprano’s version of the expression), recently participated in a large RFP. They lost, but under the category of “You can’t make this stuff up,” here was the standard issue response they received from the company that issued the RFP [names of all companies and people omitted for obvious reasons]:

This is beyond classic…

Dear Vendors,

Thank you all for participating in this RFP and providing [name of our company] with a detailed RFP. The process went not always smooth, but we now have a vendor selected. The new vendor is our old vendor.

We like to share with you that we had 12 companies participating and 10 companies were looked at from the business unit site. All 10 companies got rated by technical qualifications on a rating scale from 0 to 3 (3 was the highest technically qualified). From there we eliminated 3 companies in round 1 and 2 companies in round 2. At the end we had 5 companies with which we did negotiate best pricing scenarios over 2 rounds. At the end it was very competitive we picked the vendor that knew the situation and came down on pricing to meet our new target price.

[Our company] thanks you again for participating in this RFP and hopes that we can see you soon for another RFP.

Best regards,

I.M. Ajerk Buyer, Marketing Functions

Can you top this letter? If you can, you should post it up here….