What is an RFP?

What sits inside the document

US federal RFPs follow a fixed section order. Learn it once.

Federal solicitations in the United States typically use the Uniform Contract Format: sections A through M. Section C carries the statement of work, Section H holds special contract requirements, Section I lists the clauses, Section L gives the instructions for preparing your proposal, and Section M states the evaluation factors. Attachments and exhibits sit in Section J, which is where the pricing template and the past performance forms usually hide.

Canadian federal solicitations are organised differently but carry the same components: the requirement, the bid preparation instructions, the evaluation procedures with mandatory and rated criteria, the basis of selection, the resulting contract clauses, and annexes. Provincial and municipal RFPs vary more, but every one of them has a section that says how you will be scored.

Whatever the format, four questions decide your response: what is being bought, how will it be scored, what must the document physically look like, and when is it due.

• Statement of work: what is being bought
• Instructions: format, limits, and submission mechanics
• Evaluation factors: how points are awarded
• Clauses and annexes: what you are agreeing to

Read the evaluation criteria first

The scoring section tells you what the rest of the document is for.

Start with the evaluation section, not the statement of work. It tells you what the buyer will actually reward, how technical merit trades against price, and which factors carry the most weight. A requirement that occupies ten pages of the scope but zero lines of the evaluation criteria is not where your effort belongs.

Then find out how the trade-off works. A best value trade-off lets the buyer pay more for a stronger proposal, so strength above the minimum is worth writing. A lowest price technically acceptable evaluation does not: once you clear the bar, additional quality earns nothing and costs you on price. Canadian solicitations state the same thing in the basis of selection, which might be lowest-priced compliant bid, highest combined rating of technical merit and price, or a stated ratio between them.

Only after you know how points are earned should you go back and read the scope in detail. You will read it differently.

Mandatory criteria are pass or fail

One missed mandatory ends the bid regardless of how good the rest is.

Most solicitations separate mandatory requirements from rated ones. Mandatory items are binary: your proposal either demonstrates them or it is set aside without being scored further. They often look trivial, which is exactly why they get missed. A signed form, a specific certification, a minimum number of comparable projects within a stated number of years, a named resource with a specific credential.

Evaluators are generally not permitted to assume, infer, or go looking. If the criterion asks you to demonstrate five years of experience with a named technology and your response says your team is highly experienced with it, that is a fail, even when the claim is true and obvious from the rest of the proposal.

Build a compliance matrix before you write anything. List every shall, must, and required from the whole document, give each one a proposal section and an owner, and check the matrix again after the final edit. Late edits for page count are where compliance usually breaks.

• Extract every shall, must, and required statement
• Map each one to a section and an owner
• Answer in the words the criterion uses
• Re-check the matrix after the final page-count edit

How an evaluator actually reads your response

Not cover to cover, and not in the order you wrote it.

An evaluator usually has a scoresheet listing the criteria, a stack of proposals, and a limited amount of time. They work criterion by criterion, hunting for the evidence that lets them award points, and they record a score with a justification that has to survive review. They are frequently reading your section in isolation from the rest of your document.

That has direct consequences for how you write. Use the buyer’s headings and terminology so the evidence is findable. Put the answer in the first paragraph of the section rather than building to it. Do not make the evaluator hold two distant parts of the document in their head at once, and do not rely on a cross-reference to carry a point.

Give them the language for the justification they have to write. When a criterion asks for demonstrated experience delivering a specific service at a specific scale, a sentence naming the client, the scale, the dates, and the outcome is worth more than a page of capability description.

Questions and amendments run on a clock

The question period is the only chance to change the requirement.

Solicitations set a date after which questions are not accepted, usually well before the submission deadline. Anything ambiguous, contradictory, or impossible in the document should be raised there. Answers are issued as a formal amendment to every bidder, so a question that reveals your approach reveals it to competitors. Phrase questions to clarify the requirement rather than to signal a solution.

Amendments can change scope, extend the deadline, replace an annex, or correct an evaluation criterion. Many solicitations require you to acknowledge each amendment in your submission, and failing to do so can make the bid non-responsive. Track amendments as they land rather than checking once at the end.

If the document contains a requirement that only one supplier could meet, the question period is also the moment to say so. Raising it after award is far weaker ground, and in the United States a protest against a solicitation defect generally has to be filed before the proposal deadline rather than after the award.

Leave time for the unglamorous part

Submission mechanics disqualify more bids than weak writing.

Portals close on a hard clock, usually in the buyer’s time zone rather than yours. Upload limits, file naming rules, separate technical and financial envelopes, and required forms all have to be right. A financial figure that appears in the technical volume can invalidate a bid where the two are evaluated separately.

Plan to submit a day early where the portal allows resubmission. Print the confirmation. Where a solicitation still requires physical delivery, allow for the fact that the deadline is receipt at a named room, not postmark.

Then debrief regardless of outcome. Both a win and a loss tell you how this buyer scores, and the debriefing window is short. In the United States, requesting a required debriefing promptly also preserves protest timing that a late request can forfeit.