According to Todd Simon of Perfect Pitch Productions LLC, exhibit managers issuing RFPs often get caught up in the closed-questions game – and lose. "It's not so much that exhibitors ask the wrong things, but the way they structure those questions results in answers that don't provide the information they're looking for," he says. "Closed questions result in poor, sometimes unusable answers, and those responses can't be compared or contrasted to other answers – a crucial step in the vendor-selection process." That's because closed questions often elicit mere "yes" or "no" answers with little context. While those types of questions are the easiest to ask and the simplest to answer, they won't get you very far in terms of selecting the best supplier for your needs.

So how do you get the kind of answers you can actually use to choose a vendor for your next big project? Simon says it's all about the phrasing. Here, he takes five commonly asked RFP questions and edits them to generate valuable information that will lend itself to apples-to-apples comparisons when responses start rolling in.