I’ve watched the same scene play out hundreds of times. An HR Director needs a training programme. She opens Google, searches “leadership training Hong Kong,” visits six or seven websites, shortlists five vendors that look credible, spends an hour writing a brief, emails it to all five, and waits.
Two weeks pass. Four proposals arrive. They’re all structured the same way — background on the company, their methodology, a sample agenda, client logos, pricing at the bottom. They’re professional. They’re also almost indistinguishable from each other, because they were all written from the same basic brief, without enough context to be genuinely different.
She picks one that feels right, books a call, and has most of the same conversation she should have had at the start. Total time invested: three to four weeks, significant calendar overhead, and a decision that was made more on gut feel than on real information.
This is how most companies source corporate training in Asia. And it has a real cost.
The Hidden Cost of the RFP Approach
The obvious cost is time. But that’s not the main problem.
The deeper issue is that the RFP process is designed for procurement of goods and standardised services. It works well when you’re buying something where price and spec can be compared directly. Corporate training is not that. The quality of a training programme depends almost entirely on the fit between the vendor’s approach and your specific team, culture, and situation — and that fit is very hard to surface through a written proposal.
What actually happens is this: the proposals you receive reflect how good each vendor is at writing proposals, not how good they are at delivering training for your team. The vendors who invest in polished decks and well-structured PDFs win more often than the ones who are brilliant in the room but spend all their time doing the work.
Meanwhile, your most important question — “will this actually change behaviour in my team?” — is almost impossible to answer from a document.
Why Five Vendors Is the Wrong Number
Sending the same brief to five vendors creates a dynamic where every vendor is pricing competitively and proposing defensively. They don’t know which of the five you prefer, so they hedge. They include everything rather than recommending something specific. They price to win rather than price for what you actually need.
You also end up managing five separate email chains, five sets of follow-up questions, and five calls if you take them. That’s a part-time job on top of the rest of your role.
The sweet spot for most training sourcing decisions is two to three shortlisted vendors, reached through a process that filters by genuine fit before you invest in proposals. Getting there faster is possible — you just need a different process.
What the Alternative Looks Like
The most effective sourcing process I’ve seen starts with a single well-structured brief (not five separate emails) and a clear set of fit criteria that go beyond price and experience.
Instead of reaching out to five vendors cold and managing all the replies, you work through a curated source — a network where vendors have already been qualified, where there’s someone who understands your context and can make the first-pass match for you.
That’s what we built Growth Academy Asia to do. You send us your brief once — by message or through our platform — and our AI matches you with two to three vendors from our vetted network within 24 hours, with a tailored draft proposal for each. You get to the shortlist faster, with less noise, and with a starting point that’s already closer to what you need.
No RFP. No inbox management. No five-way comparison exercise.
What You Lose With the Old Process
Speed is the obvious one. But the thing you lose that’s harder to get back is quality of decision. When you’ve spent three weeks managing a process, you’re tired and you want it to be over. Decisions made at that stage are more likely to default to the familiar — the vendor with the best-looking deck, or the one who followed up most persistently.
The best training vendor for your team might be one you’d never have found on page one of Google. They might not have a great website. They might not be the name everyone knows. But if they’ve been interviewed and vetted, and if the match is genuinely aligned to your context, they may well be the right choice.
That’s the part of the sourcing process worth protecting. Everything else — the admin, the inbox management, the generic proposal review — you can let go of.
A Quick Note on When the RFP Process Is Worth It
If you’re sourcing a high-value, long-term L&D programme — a year-long leadership journey, a company-wide upskilling initiative with multiple vendors — a more formal process makes sense. The stakes justify the overhead.
But for most of the training decisions HR teams make throughout the year? Half-day workshops, leadership programmes, team effectiveness sessions? The RFP process adds friction without adding insight. A faster, smarter matching approach gets you to a better decision in less time.
Brief us on what you need and we’ll have matched proposals back to you in 24 hours. Or if you want to understand exactly how the matching process works first, read about the GAA approach here.
Stuart Harris is co-founder of Growth Academy Asia. He has spent 22 years working with HR teams and training providers across Hong Kong and Asia.
