How to optimize the Request for Proposal (RFP) process

From the vendor perspective, a request for proposal (RFP) is supposed to provide clarity and objectivity during the procurement process . So why do so many organizations end up with less-than-optimal outcomes?

RFPs are a mainstay of the technology landscape, and most successful businesses will have gone through the process countless times, possibly on both sides of the table. But familiarity doesn’t always translate to better results. In fact, it can have the opposite effect, obscuring inefficiencies and deeper structural problems in the way organizations develop their RFP documents and run the procurement process itself.

A good RFP should help both buyer and seller, not only by smoothing the path to procurement but also by laying the foundation for long-term value after the purchase.

In this post, we’ll explore some of the most common challenges organizations face when building and managing RFPs, and how a shift in mindset can improve outcomes for everyone involved.

Let’s dive in.

What is an RFP?

A Request for Proposal is a formal document sent out by an organization that wishes to procure a product or service from another. It’s typically reserved for high-value purchases where the stakes for the business are significant; think long-term digital transformations, enterprise-wide platform changes, or other strategic initiatives with long-term operational impact.

The document itself is usually structured as a detailed questionnaire that sets out the RFP requirements. It’s distributed to multiple vendors with the goal of generating multiple proposed solutions in response.

The purpose of the RFP is to create options. Key stakeholders within the organization can evaluate vendor proposals against a defined set of business and technical criteria, allowing them to make more informed and objective decisions about which solution best fits their needs.

Creating a comparative framework

The questionnaire document is just the first stage in an RFP response process that involves longlisting and shortlisting. 

Vendor responses that progress beyond the document stage are typically invited into meetings, workshops, and proof-of-concept demonstration sessions so that the requesting organization can deepen its understanding of the solution and the people behind it.

The goal is for the questionnaire and the broader RFP response process to help the organization establish a comparative framework, one that gives decision-makers a side-by-side perspective on solution capabilities, pricing, workflows, and long-term fit.

That framework is an alternative to approaching vendors one-by-one, and developing understanding of their solution through unstructured conversations, fragmented meetings, or subjective stakeholder opinions.

Simply put, when the stakes are high, RFPs are a way for organizations to standardize complex information, support data-driven decision-making, align internal departments, and minimize financial risk.

At least, that’s the idea.

Why RFPs (sometimes) don’t work

RFPs are supposed to help organizations create clearly defined frameworks that every party in the proposal process can work with.

But procurement is complex, and business decision-making is not always well-served by rigid, templated question-and-answer processes. In many cases, the problems start long before an organization even begins building the RFP document itself. 

Here are the key issues that undermine the RFP outcomes.

Black-boxing

In an attempt to preserve fairness and objectivity between vendors, organizations often fall into the trap of treating the RFP as a “black box” process.

In practice, that means limiting communication with vendors, defining requirements upfront, tightly controlling information flow during the process, and minimizing iteration once the questionnaire has been distributed. 

The intention here is to optimize proposal management by creating a process that feels structured, impartial, and internally defensible. The problem is that this approach can have the opposite effect.

When an RFP becomes (more or less) a box-ticking exercise, organizations lose access to vendor expertise and insight. Vendors can help develop the RFP itself, refine goals, challenge assumptions, identify blind spots, and surface alternative solutions that internal teams might not have considered. 

You don’t know what you don’t know

One of the biggest risks in any RFP process is relying too heavily on internal assumptions about what the final solution should look like.

If organizations don’t engage vendors early as part of an exploratory phase or scan the wider market landscape, they can struggle to set realistic expectations. Their internal focus prevents them from identifying gaps in their own thinking, or recognizing where technology has evolved beyond their original requirements.

This is especially true in fast-moving SaaS markets, where customer expectations, AI capabilities, and ways of working change continually.

Cross-departmental coordination

RFPs rarely affect a single team in a given organization. Modern technology decisions impact marketing, development, IT, procurement, operations, and customer experience teams simultaneously. 

Without cross-departmental coordination from the beginning, organizations risk creating questionnaires that overrepresent one team’s priorities while leaving critical gaps elsewhere. A marketing-led RFP, for example, may overlook technical implementation issues, while an IT-led process may miss usability and workflow concerns that directly affect content teams.

AI errors

It’s tempting to use generative-AI RFP software to accelerate RFP development, especially at the questionnaire stage. There are risks to this approach: AI-generated questionnaires can become repetitive, disconnected from business needs, or even introduce inaccurate or irrelevant requirements through hallucinations. 

AI reliance may also undermine the evaluation process if organizations rely on AI-generated summaries and external AI search tools when assessing vendor responses. Without appropriate governance or human oversight, AI agents may (again) hallucinate made-up information, fail to surface critical information about vendors, or provide outdated information — all of which can ultimately hurt procurement decisions. 

Version control and process complexity

The more complex the RFP process becomes, the harder it becomes to manage. As you develop your questionnaire, and then manage responses, you’ll need to continuously align teams, manage tight deadlines and dependencies, track evolving requirements, and maintain consistent document version control. 

Vendors that fail to implement a strong project management process end up working from conflicting information, which leads to internal and external confusion and undermines the process itself.

What are the key components of a successful RFP process?

There’s no universal template for a “perfect” RFP. Every organization has different business challenges, technical requirements, operational structures, and customer expectations. That said, adhering to certain principles leads to better outcomes.

The process starts early

The RFP document itself is the tip of the procurement iceberg. The RFP timeline should begin with exploratory conversations, internal alignment around business objectives, and market research that help teams understand project scope and validate assumptions before requirements are locked into a formal questionnaire. 

Engaging vendors early is also critical because it helps address the “don’t know what we don’t know” problem. It's a way to ensure that you’ll have time and space to understand market trends, identify blind spots, and develop a clearer understanding of what “good” looks like — before translating that insight into the questionnaire. 

Go beyond the questionnaire

Ideally, there should be opportunities for dialogue with vendors throughout the RFP process. Vendors will have fresh perspectives on your problem, and may consider emerging technologies and operational challenges as part of their proposal development that your teams haven’t considered.

There’s also value in rethinking how you develop and approach your evaluation criteria. Overly rigid scoring systems can obscure important nuance, context, and insight that don't fit neatly into predefined categories. 

In other words, use your RFP to deepen your understanding of the problem and its solution. For example, while you’ll (understandably) be focused on the capabilities of a new piece of technology, it’s also worth thinking about the potential organizational impact that it would have, should you choose to make a change. 

Dialogue with vendors can provide that insight, answering questions that might be difficult to frame in the RFP document, such as “Will the new tool address the human and process friction the previous one created?” and “Can the new technology adapt to our organization, or will we have to adapt to it?”

Evaluate technology and people

Technology procurement is never just about technology. It’s about how that technology will integrate with your business infrastructure, how it will hold up over time, and how it will deliver value. Which means you aren’t just evaluating capabilities, but workflows, onboarding, usability, support, and collaboration potential, as procurement priorities.

Acquiring that insight is particularly important during the demonstration phase. Instead of running a single generic demo for every stakeholder, you may benefit from splitting sessions into focused discussions. For example, a technical demo for developers, and a workflow and usability demo for marketers and other non-technical teams.

Different stakeholders prioritize different outcomes. Focused conversations create better understanding and stronger alignment across the business.

ROI matters more

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make during RFP evaluation is focusing too heavily on feature checklists. A platform may satisfy every immediate requirement on paper while still creating limitations later through poor flexibility, incompatibilities, or high long-term operational costs.

The reality is, a “winning” solution may solve your problem, and solve it cheaply, but that saving counts for nothing if it leaves you saddled with technology debt over the long term. Technology decisions need to account for total cost of ownership, scalability, adaptability, and future-proofing.

In fact, by focusing on value and return on investment (ROI), you’ll trigger better conversations with vendors, who will be more eager to raise and demonstrate capabilities and opportunities that you may not have initially considered useful.  

Expertise is invaluable

Organizations don’t need to approach an RFP blind; there are plenty of ways to build expertise and insight into the process from day one. 

Some organizations choose to work with external consultancies or implementation partners that bring broader market knowledge and procurement experience, and recommendations for suitable RFP management software. Others may opt to leverage internal resources and have teams work on RFP development in parallel with their day-to-day responsibilities.

Bear in mind that purely internal approaches carry risk. Without external input, organizations increase the risk of relying on internal assumptions, and inadvertently turning the RFP into the kind of closed-loop, black-box process we mentioned earlier. 

Long story short, if the organization doesn’t engage partners to help them develop the RFP, they should ensure vendors have appropriate opportunities to provide advice and share expertise throughout the process.

Composability, and how it changes things

The biggest shift in the way that organizations approach RFPs is in the change to enterprise technology itself. 

The age of the monolithic, one-size-fits-all platform that organizations acquire and use for decades is coming to an end. These legacy platforms typically tightly couple their functionalities, and limit the possibility for content teams to adapt and change their tools and ways of working — at least without developing complex workarounds or waiting on vendor updates. 

We’ve entered the age of composability — that is, composable software architectures that are modular, extensible, and designed to evolve over time. These platforms are built to enable organizations to assemble best-of-breed tech stacks, and integrate new, innovative tools, rather than being locked-in to a vendor-authorized system until their next transformation.

That changes things for future RFPs, because the driving question is no longer simply, “Can this platform solve our immediate problem?” In a composable ecosystem, organizations need to know that their solutions can integrate with other tools and functionalities, support continuous improvement, and be accessible for both technical and non-technical users. 

Wrapping up

We should define RFPs by what they make possible, rather than the limits they impose on respondents.

In the Contentful digital experience platform (DXP), for example, teams aren’t locked into a single strategic path. Instead of committing to a rigid, all-in-one solution, organizations can build a best-in-class technology stack that evolves over time. They can add and replace solutions as new options emerge, and continuously refine workflows without disruptive overhauls.

Contentful has seen the effects of this shift firsthand, through RFP processes for hundreds of organizations around the world. We’ve worked alongside brands and teams as trusted advisors, and we’ve gained insight into how composable approaches deliver for them in complex, competitive environments.  

The RFP can be a game-changing part of that process if we frame it as a foundation for long-term change, rather than a short-term problem-solver.

Want to know more? Reach out to the Contentful team to take the next step. 

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