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Commerce, CA

Agency – Commerce, CA

Interviewee – Vilko Domic

Interview Date – 1/12/17

Outcome – Won 

Proposal Bid – $71,060

RSM - John Redfern

Proposal - originally dated August 2016

Background

  • Commerce is a current CivicPlus customer - http://www.ci.commerce.ca.us/ - and is community of about 12,000 in East Los Angeles straddling the 5 freeway
  • The process started 2 years ago when they asked for budget approval from their AA committee (group that allocates sales tax revenue) and council
  • The finance team developed the RFP and received 9 submittals
  • The finance staff reduced that to 5 vendors to give in-house presentations
  • Another 6-7 months passed and after asking some additional questions they narrowed the field to 3 vendors - Vision, CivicPlus and CivicLive
  • At this time, Vilko met with John and started to see separation between Vision and the other vendors even though we were about 50% higher at that time
  • Some more time passed and in early November, the 3 finalists were brought before the city council and city manager
    • Going into the meeting, Vilko said that Vision was his preference but he wanted to get that validated with presentation
    • Ashley stepped in and gave the presentation (Redfern was under the weather on the day of the presentation) and did a great job; she followed instructions and compressed her presentation into the recommended 15 minutes so there was time for Q&A (he was surprised that she was able to cover so much in 15 minutes)
    • Council was interested in community engagement and they liked that visionPulse was coming out soon
    • CivicPlus did their presentation by webex and CivicLive presentation went on too long and turned 
    • In the end, the council input coincided with staff's recommendation and scoring, and they recommended going with Vision

Why did we win?

  • Negotiation - Vilko appreciated that we were willing to work with him to lower our initial bid from $110,000 to $70,000
  • Responsiveness - customer service is important to Vilko and he felt we were more responsive than the other vendors
  • CMS backend and workflow - Vilko thought our CMS and workflow were easier to use; his IT team also thought it would be easier to make changes down the line with Vision too
  • More personable - the personal side was important to Vilko; John was more personable than the other sales guys and made the process seamless and comfortable; Vilko didn't get that same feeling from the other vendors

What could we improve?

  • Vilko didn't have any suggestions

Other points

  • He felt that all 3 finalists would have done a fine job building a website, but felt more comfortable with Vision
  • CivicPlus - the city had been butting heads with CP for a while and was pushing the city to go sole source without going to bid and were shocked that it went to RFP; Vilko said they had an aura of arrogance too and did their council presentation via phone 

Takeaways

  • Keep focus on customer service/responsiveness - we came across as more personable and responsive compared to other vendors, and should continue to cultivate that with prospects
  • Leverage local whenever possible - we got a boost from Vilko because we were a local company
  • Patience - this was an 12 month process from initial contact to contract signing, and most of the time lapse was from the city; we have to recognize that local government has competing requests for their time and that things slip due to no one's fault