RFP · Request for Proposal
Request for Proposal
What is an RFP?
- A formal request to “propose on these terms”
- Sent to several suppliers at once
- Understanding requirements and differentiating are what win
The moment an RFP arrives, the sales game changes. Until then you persuaded your contact face to face, but now five or six evaluators you have never met spread out a scoring sheet and grade you on documents alone. Your audience shifts from 'someone you know' to 'judges you have never met,' so sales after an RFP becomes a contest of document design, not relationships.
Telling it apart from the documents before and after it makes responding much easier. An RFI is the stage where the buyer surveys what is on the market, so the more information you offer, the more your perspective seeps into the requirements. An RFQ comes after specifications are already fixed and only asks for price, making it effectively a lowest-price contest. An RFP sits in between, where the problem is defined but the solution is still open. In training, RFPs typically split technical and price evaluation at around 8:2, and the technical score is further divided among course design, instructor background, similar track record and operational support. A single question asked during the Q&A period, which usually opens 3 to 5 days after the announcement, can even change how the requirements are interpreted.
Two things most often go wrong in practice. One is the token bid: many RFPs are sent out as a formality because internal rules require quotes from three companies. Be suspicious if terminology used by only one solution is built into the requirements, or if there are only 7 days between announcement and deadline. The other is restructuring the proposal in your own style. Evaluators read the scoring sheet in the order of the RFP’s table of contents, so if you rearrange the contents, even well-written material scores zero as 'item not found.' You differentiate not by changing the table of contents but by what you do within each item. It is also common to be eliminated over a single formal requirement, such as format, seal or page limit, before anyone even reads the content.
John KimAuthor of B2B Marketing Design and CEO of Nanum Consulting
Jaehyuk ParkHands-on instructor in B2B technical sales and AI-driven sales strategyA long-established formal document in procurement, standardized because public institutions and large corporations need to select suppliers transparently and fairly. It is used alongside the RFI (request for information) and RFQ (request for quotation).
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, an auto parts manufacturer with 2,400 employees and annual revenue of roughly KRW 800 (≈ US$1) billion, issued an RFP for a leadership program for 140 newly appointed team leaders. There were 12 days until the proposal deadline, and 7 training providers had expressed interest. Company A had run similar programs for three years and was frustrated: 'Completion rates are 95%, but nothing changes on the job.'
- Four months before the RFP went out, we heard Ms. Kim, an HR manager, mention that 'team-leader interview records keep piling up but nobody can interpret them,' and ran a two-hour free diagnostic workshop.
- We summarized the workshop results in an 8-page report, and three months later the evaluation sheet of the published RFP included 'interview-data-based diagnostic design' worth 15 points.
- During the Q&A period, we asked whether the 140 people should be treated as a single cohort or split into groups. The answer was 'splitting into 4 cohorts is allowed, but the lead instructor must stay the same,' so we rebuilt the entire proposal structure.
- The proposal followed the RFP’s table-of-contents numbering word for word; the first line of each item stated in one sentence whether the requirement was met, and the differentiators sat in a separate box beneath it.
- Of the 20-minute presentation, 7 minutes went to an anonymized sample analysis of the interview logs Company A had actually accumulated, and the purchasing manager asked mid-presentation, 'Isn't this our data?'
- With a technical score of 87.4, the proposal beat the runner-up (81.2) by 6 points and won a KRW 230 million (≈ US$172,100) contract; the following year the number of cohorts grew from 4 to 7, leading to a renewal.