In my article “2007 – welcome to the year of convergence“, I wrote about the industry become more professional and I’ve been meaning to add more details to that. An example is Mike O’Connor’s approach to selecting a broker for one of five of his premium domain names – an interesting and new approach for our industry, but rather common in “oldschool” markets.

What’s an RFP? Let’s ask Wikipedia:

A Request for Proposal (referred to as RFP) is an invitation for suppliers, through a bidding process, to bid on a specific product or service.

Mike was kind enough to take out some time to answer some of my questions via email.

Frank: Mike, thank you for taking the time to conduct this short email interview with me. First of all, let me congratulate you in doing something innovate. While not everything new we try will work out, it’s always important to keep on trying to move the industry forward. Why did you choose to create an RFP?

Mike: I decided to do an RFP partly out of old habit. Back in the days when I worked for a living, one of my jobs was with a Big 8 (er… Big 6 (er… Big 4)) consulting firm and we did boatloads of projects selecting vendors for one thing and another. So the RFP process is just a familiar one.

Another reason is because I wanted to reflect on what services I want the broker to provide. My sense of the current brokerage environment is that it’s pretty early-stage and the services I want may not be available yet. So I wanted to lay those out in a lot of detail before going out to the vendor community.

I also want to have a way to do a side-by-side comparison on the brokers, and an RFP is a good way to structure all that information.

Finally, I wanted to get the word out as widely as I could. I don’t know who all the brokers are and by publishing the RFP I’m hoping to cast a wider net than I would if I just worked word of mouth.

Frank: And why would the broker only be selling one out of the five names?

Mike: I’ve decided that I want to sell about one name a year. My guess is that the names will continue to appreciate, but I want to hedge that bet by taking a little money off the table. By selling a name a year, I’m hoping to strike a balance there.

My approach is to find a broker who is really good at marketing AND sales, and has specialized in a retail market segment that’s appropriate for the domain. So I’m letting the brokers choose which name they’d like to sell, so as to be able to best match the name to their selling strength.

Frank: I would expect that some brokers will respond to the RFP, while others might pass considering the amount of time required to provide all the requested information, because they might consider it cumbersome. Could this possibly lower your chances of actually selling a name?

Mike: I’m getting pretty strenuous push-back from some of the brokers, that’s for sure. In some cases it’s getting quite vehement. I, of course being Irish and loving a good debate, have been rollicking along defending my position and approach. But the upshot may be that I will have thrown a party to which nobody comes.

That’s ok with me. That’s another facet of the RFP process. Sometimes the outcome is “no interested or qualified vendors.” It’s a lot cheaper to find that out through an RFP than to go through all the pain of being in a deal where I’m fundamentally at odds with my broker.

Frank: Thank you very much for your time Mike – please keep us in the updated about the progress you are making.

Unfortunately no broker selected a proposal by Mike’s deadline, which was February 12th.

But let’s look at it through Theodore Roosevelt’s eyes:

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

(Thanks for the quote to Paul Whiteside.)

[via Mike's blog]