7 RFP Mistakes That Cost You the Contract

Nobody calls to tell you why you lost. The rejection email says "another bidder more closely met our requirements" and that's it. No feedback. No score breakdown. No hint about what went wrong.

But after reviewing hundreds of post-award debriefs, the same mistakes keep showing up. Not bad pricing. Not weak technical skills. Preventable errors that quietly tank your score before the evaluator finishes reading.

Here are the seven that come up the most, and what to do about each one.

Evaluators score what you wrote against specific criteria. They have a rubric. They are looking for particular words, evidence, and structure. If the RFP asked for your approach to quality management and you wrote three paragraphs about your ISO 9001 certification, you missed the point.

They wanted your process. How do you catch defects? What happens when something fails inspection? Who reviews deliverables before they ship? Your certificate tells them you passed an audit once. It says nothing about how you actually run quality on their project.

Reusing content is fine. Copy-pasting without tailoring is not. The client name is wrong. The project description doesn't match. The scope references services you aren't even bidding for. One paragraph talks about a 12-month delivery when this contract is for 6 months.

Evaluators read dozens of proposals for each RFP. They develop a sharp eye for boilerplate. When they spot recycled text, it signals that you didn't care enough to write a real response. That impression colors how they score everything else.

A 200-page RFP can contain hundreds of requirements scattered across multiple sections, appendices, and amendment documents. Miss a single mandatory "shall" statement and your entire submission can be flagged as non-compliant. In public sector procurement, that often means automatic disqualification. No second chances.

The problem is volume. Requirements hide in footnotes, in appendix tables, in amendment documents posted a week before the deadline. Manual extraction is slow and error-prone, especially when your team is already stretched thin.

Compare these two statements:

Evaluators are trained to notice hedging. Words like "endeavour," "aim to," "where possible," and "as appropriate" are red flags. They tell the evaluator you are not actually committing to anything. The bidder who makes concrete promises with dates, frequencies, and deliverables will score higher every time.

Most RFPs publish their evaluation criteria. Some even publish the weightings. If quality is weighted at 70% and price at 30%, spending 80% of your effort sharpening the price is backwards. You are optimizing for the smaller part of the score while underinvesting in the part that matters most.

This mistake is more common than you would think. Teams default to what they know. If your BD lead is a numbers person, the pricing section will be polished while the technical response gets a first-draft treatment. That's a structural disadvantage.

Submission portals crash. File size limits reject your upload. The system requires a format you didn't test. Your PDF has a corrupted font. The portal clock is in a different timezone. Your internet connection drops during the upload.

Teams that submit within the final hour are betting that nothing will go wrong. That bet loses more often than people admit. And when it does lose, the outcome is binary: you are either on time or you are disqualified. There is no partial credit.

The executive summary is the single most-read section of any proposal. Senior evaluators and decision-makers often read only this section before the shortlisting discussion. If it does not tell them why you are the right choice within about 500 words, they start the detailed evaluation with a neutral or negative impression. That impression is hard to reverse.

A bad executive summary reads like a company brochure. It talks about your history, your values, your headquarters. None of that answers the buyer's real question: "Why should we pick you for this specific project?"

Pre-Submission Self-Audit Checklist

Before you hit submit on your next bid, run through this list. Every "no" is a score leak.

None of these mistakes require more talent to fix. They require more discipline. The teams that win consistently are not always the most qualified bidders. They are the ones who eliminate unforced errors and make it easy for evaluators to give them high scores.

If you want to go deeper on compliance tracking, read our guide on how to write a winning RFP response, which covers building a compliance matrix and structuring each section for maximum score.