How to respond to an RFP without burning a week

RFPs are the only sales activity agencies treat as free. Everyone knows a week of senior time has a cost, and nobody puts that cost against the deal.

Work it through on a hypothetical agency. A serious RFP response takes 38 hours across the team — a strategist, a designer, an account lead, someone doing the formatting at 11pm. At a loaded cost of $95 an hour, that's $3,610 of team time per response. Win one in six and each win has cost $21,660 in bid time. If the average RFP win is $80,000 at 30% margin, the project generates $24,000 of margin. You've spent $21,660 to earn $24,000.

	Per response	Per win (1 in 6)
Hours	38	228
Cost at $95/hr	$3,610	$21,660
Margin on an $80,000 win	—	$24,000
Left over	—	$2,340

That's the real economics of an RFP habit nobody measures. The fix isn't to stop responding. It's to respond to fewer, faster.

Decide in 20 minutes whether to bid

Before anyone opens a document, answer six questions. Any two "no"s and you decline.

• Did we know about this before it was published? If the first you heard of it was the RFP itself, someone else has been shaping the requirements for months.
• Can we speak to a human? If questions are only accepted in writing through a portal, you're being scored on paperwork, not fit.
• Is the budget stated or knowable? "Please provide your best pricing" with no range means you're the market research.
• Is the evaluation criteria weighted and published? If price is 60% of the score, you already know who wins.
• How many are they inviting? Six or more and you're filler.
• Do we have a genuine, specific advantage here? Not "we do great work" — something you could put in one sentence that the other bidders can't.

Write the answers down and keep them. After a year you'll have a real picture of which RFP types you win, which is more useful than any general advice about RFPs.

Ask the questions everyone else skips

Most RFPs have a clarification window and most bidders use it to ask about formatting. Use it properly:

• What's the budget range this needs to fall inside? We'd rather design a proposal that fits than send one you can't approve.
• Who will be scoring the responses, and what are the weightings?
• Is there an incumbent, and are they bidding?
• What went wrong last time, or what's changed that made you go to market?
• What's the single thing that would make you pick one agency over another?

Two things happen. You get information that materially changes what you write, and in some procurement processes those answers get circulated to every bidder — so you've forced useful clarity into a process that had none. If the answers come back evasive on all five, that's the strongest decline signal you'll get.

Build the library once

Most of an RFP response is the same every time: company background, insurance and compliance details, team CVs, process descriptions, security and data handling, references, accessibility statements, sustainability policy.

Write these once, properly. Keep them in one place, dated, with an owner. Review them quarterly. On any given bid you should be assembling 60–70% of the document from existing material and writing only the parts that are genuinely about this client.

The parts that must be written fresh every time:

• The understanding of their problem
• The specific approach and why it fits
• The team you're putting on it and why those people
• Pricing and assumptions
• The two most relevant examples of past work

Everything else is a copy-paste with the client's name changed. If you're rewriting your data-protection paragraph for the fourth time this year, that's the thing to fix first.

What the leaner version costs

Same agency, with a qualification gate and a real library. Responses now take 12 hours instead of 38, because the boilerplate is assembled rather than written and the ones you'd have lost anyway never get started.

	Before	After
Hours per response	38	12
Cost per response at $95/hr	$3,610	$1,140
Cost per win at 1 in 6	$21,660	$6,840
Margin left from an $80,000 win	$2,340	$17,160

Note what that assumes: the win rate stays the same. That's the honest, cautious version. In practice a bid you qualified properly and asked hard questions about tends to convert better than one you entered by reflex — but you don't need that to be true for the arithmetic to work. Even holding the win rate flat, the same win keeps more than seven times the margin.

Answer the question they asked

The most common reason good agencies score badly on formal RFPs is that they answer the question they wish had been asked.

If the document says "describe your approach to stakeholder management, max 500 words", the scorer has a rubric with points for specific things. Answer in the order asked, use their headings, stay inside the word count, and put the direct answer in the first sentence of each section. Save the creative reframing for the executive summary and the presentation, where it can actually win you something.

A response that scores well on the rubric and is a bit dull will beat a beautiful one that lost points for not addressing section 4.3.

Decline properly

When you decline, send a short note rather than silence:

Thanks for including us. We've had a look and we don't think we're the right fit for this one — [specific, honest reason: the timeline needs a team we can't free up, the scope is outside what we do well, the budget range is below where we can deliver this properly].

If the scope or timing shifts, I'd genuinely like another look. And if it's useful, I'm happy to tell you what I'd look for in the responses you do get.

That last line costs you nothing and occasionally gets you the work when the process collapses. More often it gets you invited to the next one, which is worth more than the bid you just declined.

This week

Count the RFPs and competitive proposals you responded to in the last twelve months, and how many you won. Multiply the losses by a rough hour count and your loaded hourly cost. That's what the habit cost you.

Then take your two most recent responses and pull every reusable paragraph into a single document. That one afternoon takes the biggest bite out of the number.