The Bid Manager's Guide to Faster RFP Turnaround

The average RFP response takes 20 to 25 working days, according to APMP benchmarks. But deadlines rarely give you that long. Two weeks is common. Ten days is not unusual. Five days happens more than it should.

The teams that handle tight deadlines consistently are not working longer hours. They are not pulling all-nighters and throwing bodies at the problem. They have systems that eliminate wasted time. They know where the hours actually go, and they have cut the steps that do not contribute to the final submission.

This guide breaks down a typical response timeline, identifies where time gets lost, and gives you a concrete plan for cutting a three-week process down to five days.

Where Time Actually Goes

Before you can speed up a process, you need to see where the time is spent. Here is what a typical 15-day RFP response looks like when you map each activity to the calendar:

Days	Activity
Day 1 to 2	Reading and understanding the document
Day 3	Go/No-Go decision (often delayed further)
Day 4 to 5	Assigning sections and planning the response
Day 6 to 10	Writing the response
Day 11 to 12	Internal review
Day 13 to 14	Revisions and formatting
Day 15	Final check and submission

Look at that breakdown carefully. Half the calendar is spent before anyone starts writing. Five full days go to reading, deciding, and planning. That is where the biggest gains are hiding.

The real bottleneck

Most teams assume writing is the slow part. It rarely is. The slow parts are the steps before writing: extracting requirements, waiting for a Go/No-Go decision, and assigning sections. Fix those, and the whole timeline compresses.

Cut the Reading Phase

The reading phase is the single biggest time sink in most RFP responses. Someone, usually the bid manager, sits down with a 100 to 200 page document and reads it cover to cover. They highlight requirements, cross-reference evaluation criteria, note mandatory qualifications, and build a compliance matrix by hand. That process takes a full working day, sometimes two.

There are two ways to cut this down significantly.

Use AI extraction tools

Tools like RFP Matrix can extract requirements from a tender document in minutes. You upload the PDF, and the tool returns a structured list of every requirement, evaluation criterion, and submission instruction. What used to take eight hours now takes ten minutes. That alone saves you a full day on every bid.

Read backwards from the evaluation criteria

Even without a tool, you can speed this up. Skip the background sections and go straight to the evaluation criteria or scoring methodology. That tells you what the buyer actually cares about. Then read the requirements table. Then read the submission instructions. Read the narrative sections last, and only if they contain information you have not already captured. Most of the page count in an RFP is context, not requirements.

Decide Faster

Go/No-Go meetings that take a week to schedule waste everyone's time. The tender lands on Monday. The bid manager reads it on Tuesday. They send a summary to leadership on Wednesday. A meeting gets booked for the following Monday. By the time the team gets the green light, five working days have already passed and nobody has written a word.

Fix this with a scoring framework. Define your Go/No-Go criteria in advance: strategic fit, capability match, competitive position, relationship with the buyer, and commercial viability. When a new tender arrives, score it against those criteria and make the call within 24 hours.

Related Resource

We have a full breakdown of how to build and use a scoring framework in our Go/No-Go Decision Framework post. You can also use the Go/No-Go Decision Tool to score an opportunity in minutes.

The decision does not need a boardroom meeting. It needs a clear framework, honest inputs, and someone with the authority to say yes or no. If your organisation cannot make a Go/No-Go call within one business day, that is the first process to fix.

Write in Parallel

The traditional approach is sequential: the bid manager reads everything, builds a plan, assigns sections, and then writers start drafting. Each of those steps waits for the previous one to finish. That serialisation adds days to the timeline for no good reason.

The faster approach is to assign sections to writers on day one, as soon as the Go/No-Go decision is made. Each writer reads only their assigned sections of the RFP, not the entire document. The bid manager reads everything and provides context where needed, but the writers do not need a full document review before they start drafting.

Sequential approach

Bid manager reads full document (2 days), builds plan (1 day), assigns sections (half day), writers read full document (1 day), writers start drafting. Total: 4.5 days before any writing begins.

Parallel approach

Bid manager extracts requirements and assigns sections (morning of day 1). Writers read their assigned sections and start drafting (afternoon of day 1). Total: half a day before writing begins.

This only works if the bid manager is comfortable delegating early and if writers are comfortable working with partial context. Both of those are skills you build with practice. The first time you try this, it will feel uncomfortable. By the third or fourth bid, it will feel normal.

Build a Content Library

Between 60 and 80 percent of most RFPs ask questions you have answered before. Company overview. Methodology descriptions. Team CVs. Case studies. Health and safety policies. Quality management systems. Environmental credentials. Insurance details.

If these are written well, reviewed, approved, and stored in an accessible location, you paste and tailor instead of writing from scratch. A section that takes three hours to write from nothing takes 30 minutes to adapt from a strong existing answer.

Start with the questions that appear on every bid

Company overview, key personnel, methodology, health and safety, and quality management. Write gold-standard versions of each one.

Keep case studies current and tagged by sector

Each case study should include the client sector, project value, scope of work, outcomes, and a testimonial. Tag them so you can quickly find the most relevant example for each bid.

Review and update quarterly

Stale content is worse than no content. Set a quarterly reminder to review your library. Update figures, refresh case studies, and remove anything that no longer reflects your current capabilities.

A well-maintained content library is the single biggest accelerator for RFP response speed. Teams that have one consistently report cutting their writing time in half.

Review Once, Review Right

Many teams fall into a cycle of endless review rounds. The first draft goes to a reviewer who marks it up. The writer revises. The reviewer marks it up again. A second reviewer gets involved with different feedback. The writer revises again. A third pass catches formatting issues that should have been handled from the start. Three or four review cycles eat three or four days, and much of that time is spent on feedback that contradicts earlier feedback.

Two review cycles is enough if each one is done properly.

Review Round	Focus	Who
First review	Technical accuracy, compliance with requirements, completeness of answers, correct evidence and case studies	Subject matter expert or delivery lead
Second review	Readability, consistent tone, formatting, spelling, and submission compliance (page limits, font, file naming)	Bid manager or proposal coordinator

If you find yourself needing a third review round, the problem is not the review process. The problem is either the writing quality going into review, or unclear review criteria. Fix the inputs rather than adding another pass through the document.

Practical tip: use a review checklist

Give each reviewer a checklist of exactly what they are reviewing for. This prevents scope creep in reviews. A technical reviewer should not be rewriting sentences for style, and an editorial reviewer should not be questioning technical decisions. Clear lanes make reviews faster and less contentious.

The 5-Day Response Timeline

Here is what a compressed, five-day response timeline looks like when you apply every principle above. This is not theoretical. Teams that have their systems in place can execute this on a standard-complexity tender.

Day	Morning	Afternoon
Day 1	Extract requirements (AI tool or manual fast-scan). Run Go/No-Go scoring. Make the call by lunch.	Assign sections to writers. Pull relevant content from the library. Writers start reading their assigned sections.
Day 2	All writers drafting in parallel. Bid manager available for questions and context.	Continue drafting. Bid manager begins assembling boilerplate sections (CVs, policies, certificates).
Day 3	Writers complete first drafts. Sections submitted to bid manager by end of morning.	First review: technical accuracy and compliance check. Feedback returned to writers by end of day.
Day 4	Writers address review feedback. Revisions completed by midday.	Second review: readability, consistency, formatting. Bid manager assembles the final document.
Day 5	Final polish. Check submission requirements (format, naming, page limits). Submit by noon.	Buffer time. If everything is submitted, use this for a post-submission debrief and library updates.

Important caveat

This timeline assumes you already have a content library, a Go/No-Go framework, and writers who know the material. If you are building these for the first time, your next bid will not hit five days. But each bid will get faster as your systems mature. The goal is continuous improvement, not overnight transformation.

Speed Comes from Preparation

Every technique in this guide has one thing in common: it requires work before the tender arrives. Building a content library takes time. Creating a Go/No-Go framework takes thought. Training writers to work from partial context takes practice. Setting up review checklists takes discipline.

None of that can be done at midnight on the day before submission.

The teams that consistently turn around RFPs in five days are not panicking. They are running a system they built during quiet periods. They invested the time between tenders so they could move fast when it mattered. That preparation is the difference between a scramble and a process.

Start with one improvement. If you do not have a content library, build one this week. If your Go/No-Go process takes more than a day, fix it before the next tender lands. If your reviews run to three or four rounds, create a checklist and cut it to two. Each change shaves days off your timeline.

The next tight deadline is coming. Build your systems now, while you have the time.

Cut your reading phase to minutes

RFP Matrix extracts every requirement from your tender documents automatically. Stop spending a full day reading and start writing sooner. Get started and see how much time you save on your next bid.