R.I.P. RFP: Saying Goodbye to the Request For Proposal -and spilling the secrets it left behind

RFP – Necessary Evil or Outdated Ritual?

Think of the last time you saw an RFP (Request for Proposal) land on your desk.

1. Did you feel a surge of confidence…
2. Or did you quietly sigh…

“Here we go again?” You’re not alone (68% of vendors would rather not respond either). In theory, RFPs are meant to ensure rigorous, fair vendor selection. In practice, they frequently lead to suboptimal outcomes, squelch innovation, strain relationships, and serve more as corporate CYA (“cover your a** 🫏”) than as a catalyst for great solutions.

Sound provocative? Let’s break down why so many executives are disillusioned with the RFP, and why some joke that RFP really stands for “Really Frustrating Process.” Along the way, we’ll share a few telling stories (some a bit too familiar) to illustrate the point.

1. The Promise vs. Reality: Poor Outcomes & Suboptimal Results

On paper, an RFP should get you the best deal and solution. In reality, it often delivers a lukewarm compromise – or worse, outright failure. A bad or incomplete RFP usually yields confusing proposals, more questions than answers, and ultimately a decision that doesn’t meet your true needs.

Consider this cautionary tale:

A mid-sized city set out to modernize its aging IT system. They knew they wanted a cutting-edge cloud solution, so they issued a formal RFP. The catch? Instead of writing fresh requirements, they copied an old template from years prior. The result was a bizarre wish-list that claimed to want cloud tech while demanding legacy on-premise features. Most qualified vendors took one look and didn’t even bid – their modern solutions didn’t tick all the archaic boxes. The one vendor that did bid figured they’d sort out the details after winning. They won the contract… but once the project kicked off, both sides realized the requirements and reality didn’t match at all. The project collapsed, the contract was canceled, and months of work and big money went down the drain. The city was back to square one.

This isn’t an isolated fiasco; it’s a pattern. Research shows “94% of large-scale federal projects have been unsuccessful” in the past decade – a shocking stat often tied to rigid procurement and RFP processes. Even in the private sector, companies admit that RFP-driven initiatives frequently underdeliver.

Why?         

• Checkbox Requirements Over Outcomes: Instead of focusing on business goals, RFPs often list dozens (or hundreds) of detailed requirements. Vendors end up in a box-ticking beauty contest , saying “yes” to as much as possible to score points. It’s a flawed approach because having 100 features means nothing if those features don’t solve your core problem. As one tech executive quipped, you could end up with “Max Verstappen’s Formula 1 car in your driveway – a marvel of technology – but you can’t drive it to work” . In other words, you might select a vendor that looks great on paper yet can’t practically deliver value.

No surprise that:

1. 40% of RFP evaluation scores lack consensus among decision-makers (everyone’s overwhelmed by feature lists)
2. Less than 35% of organizations were satisfied with their RFP process as of last year.
3. (The other 25% quit from frustration, exhaustion, lobotomies 🤷-not a real statistic)

• Illusion of Competitive Bids: RFPs are supposed to get the best price, but often the opposite happens. Procurement experts note that vendors typically hold back their best offers during a formal RFP – they reserve the deepest discounts for strategic customers or real negotiations later . In an RFP, suppliers know it’s a one-shot game, so they play it safe. One cost-optimization firm bluntly states: “RFPs almost always fall short of delivering the best deals.” And if you do pick the lowest bid, watch out: vendors may underbid to win and then fail to deliver, or pile on change orders. Hidden costs and nasty surprises after contract award are common when the initial RFP missed key details (e.g. “Oops, that wasn’t in the RFP – it’ll cost extra”).
• 🐌 Slow and Resource-Draining: The RFP process is painfully slow. By the time you craft the RFP, issue it, wait for responses, sift through proposals, hold countless scoring meetings, select a vendor, negotiate, and sign… months have passed. In practice, an RFP often takes 4–6 months at minimum – many drag on closer to a year . Meanwhile, your needs evolve and the market doesn’t wait. Competitors are rolling out new features while you’re still in RFP purgatory . One exec joked that by the end of a lengthy RFP, “every ounce of excitement and energy for the project has dissipated” – your team just wants to pick someone and get on with it. Worse yet, RFPs chew up enormous effort on all sides. Vendors sink huge time (one spent $500k in staff hours on a single RFP bid!) – costs that inevitably get passed back to the buyer. Internally, your team diverts weeks to writing requirements and reviewing massive proposals. All that effort is worthwhile only if the outcome is great… but too often it’s not.

In short, what was meant to ensure a great result can ironically set you up for a mediocre one. As one procurement veteran admitted, RFPs “weren’t invented to identify the best solution” to a problem . They’re a process to manage risk and appease bureaucracy – which sometimes means the real goal (solve X problem, achieve Y outcome) gets lost in the paperwork. And when that happens, executives end up with the very thing they fear: a poor outcome and a lot of finger-pointing about who followed the “process.”

2. Conformity Over Creativity: How RFPs Stifle Innovation

If you’re seeking fresh, game-changing ideas from suppliers, a rigid RFP might be the worst way to get them. Innovation thrives on open-ended thinking, collaboration, and iteration – not on checking whether a 50-page spec is met to the letter. Yet traditional RFPs often send a clear (if unintended) message: “Color inside the lines, or don’t bother.”

Leadership gurus have noticed a troubling disconnect: Business unit leaders constantly talk about the importance of supplier innovation, while folks almost never make “innovation partnership” a priority. In fact, one Harvard Business Review writer noted that some managers get better innovation by deliberately bypassing formal processes. How crazy is that? The system that’s supposed to help choose the best partner actually ends up so restrictive that people work around it to get new ideas.

Here’s why RFPs often put creativity in a chokehold:

• Overly Prescriptive Requirements: Ever seen an RFP that seems to already dictate the solution in excruciating detail?

“We want a system that does A, B, C…X, Y, Z, uses XYZ technology, integrates exactly like this, etc.”Such RFPs leave no room for vendors to propose a novel approach. “That level of specificity stifles innovation” because it handcuffs the inventiveness of would-be bidders.

Vendors quickly learn that deviating from the RFP – even to suggest a better idea – could get them disqualified. So, they play it safe and offer cookie-cutter, boilerplate proposals. In one survey, 54% of companies said most RFP responses they receive are copy-paste jobs, and half complained that proposals are just “sales fluff” lacking any creativity . Can you blame the vendors? The process rewards conformity. One tongue-in-cheek anecdote: a tech firm leader once decided to answer an RFP by literally saying “Yes” to every requirement – just to see what would happen. Unsurprisingly, they made the shortlist… but the client learned nothing new from any vendor, since everyone was effectively forced to respond with generic “we do that” assurances.

• Backward-Looking Focus:

RFP questionnaires often reflect yesterday’s needs        

A classic example: companies asking dozens of questions about on-premise software capabilities when they ostensibly want a cloud solution . Innovative suppliers read those questions and realize the client is using an outdated yardstick. As one article put it, “If you’re looking for transformative innovation, you won’t find it via an RFP” when the RFP itself assumes the old way of doing things . The format simply doesn’t allow vendors to highlight how they’re different or propose a forward-thinking model . Henry Ford allegedly said, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.” RFPs that ask every vendor to fit the same old template virtually guarantee just that – no disruptive ideas, and all proposals start to look eerily similar.

• Innovation Gets Lost in Translation: Even when you try to invite creative solutions, the rigid scoring process can kill them off. Procurement may reduce proposals to scorecards: Did Vendor A mention feature X? Give them 5 points. But many innovative solutions don’t check every box – they might approach the problem in a whole new way. A strict RFP might rank those bold proposals lower simply for not following the conventional checklist . As one sales expert observed, RFPs often become “a list of features that end up disqualifying killer solutions for trivial reasons.” The result: vendors with truly creative approaches either don’t bother participating, or get scored into last place for thinking outside the box. No wonder smaller, nimble companies with innovative ideas often opt out of RFPs entirely – it’s just not worth the effort for them to “dumb down” their offering to fit a templated form . One study noted this self-selection: the onerous RFP process deters many agile vendors, meaning the proposal pool you get is limited and less innovative .
• Kills Agile Collaboration: Perhaps the biggest innovation-killer is the lack of dialogue. In many RFPs, buyers strictly limit contact with vendors – no conversations outside formal Q&A, no collaboration. The intent is fairness, but the impact is that vendors can’t workshop ideas with you. They have to guess at the best solution in a vacuum. By contrast, think of innovation-friendly approaches like hackathons or pilot projects where teams iterate together. None of that is possible in the typical RFP. As a result, vendors stick to safe answers rather than brainstorming something bold. An open-ended problem statement (“here’s our challenge, what could you do to solve it?”) would yield far more creative responses – but RFPs rarely pose questions that way. They ask for deliverables, requirements, guarantees – leaving little room for “What if we tried X?” proposals.

Executives lament this all the time. A Chief HR Officer might be searching for a cutting-edge HRIS or training platform to transform their workforce, but an RFP will just get them a pile of compliance checklists from large incumbents. The scrappy startup with a genius solution either never got invited or couldn’t squeeze into the tight RFP mold. As a result, companies select the “safest” option, not the most innovative – and miss out on potential breakthroughs. It’s innovation by conformity. And in fast-moving markets, that’s a recipe for obsolescence.

3. Transactional Deals vs. Strategic Partnerships

Business leaders often talk about building strategic partnerships with key suppliers – relationships where both sides invest in each other’s success, share ideas, and create long-term value.

Unfortunately, the RFP process tends to do the opposite: it creates transactional, arms-length vendor relationships from day one.

By treating the engagement like a commodity to be bid on, it’s hard to later pivot and say, “Let’s be true partners now.” Several executives have noted how an RFP can set the wrong tone at the very start of a vendor relationship.

• 🧟Contractual Rigor Mortis: After surviving the RFP gauntlet, the “winner” and the buyer typically lock into a detailed contract based on the proposal. Everything is defined up front (often overly so). While clarity is good, this can backfire when reality changes. And reality will change. New business needs arise, technologies evolve, or the vendor discovers a better way to achieve the outcome after starting work. But what happens? The vendor points to the contract and says, “Sorry, that’s out of scope.” Every new idea or request beyond the original RFP becomes a renegotiation or an additional charge. The flexibility and collaboration that mark true partnerships get stifled by the rigid framework set in the RFP. As one observer put it, because you tried to nail down every detail 18+ months ago in the RFP, now “whenever a new idea or a better way is found,” it’s met with contractual resistance and frustration . Both sides can start feeling like adversaries tussling over a deal, rather than partners solving a problem.
• 😕Trust Erosion: RFPs often assume a lack of trust – that’s why they are heavy on detailed requirements, vendor stipulations, SLAs, penalties, etc. The whole tone is: “We don’t know you yet, so prove everything and sign here that you’ll deliver exactly this.” It’s hard to transition from that mindset into a warm, trust-based partnership. In fact, research in HBR noted that in many companies, procurement is so cost- and compliance-focused that business teams actually hide “grey market” innovation projects from them . Why? Because once procurement (and an RFP) is involved, the relationship becomes about oversight and cost-cutting, not collaboration. This kind of dynamic is toxic to supplier innovation. If your vendors feel like they have to “work around” your formal process to bring new ideas, you’re essentially encouraging a transactional, not candid, relationship.
• 🤼 No “Win-Win” Incentive: In a partnership, both sides win when the other wins – there’s skin in the game. But an RFP, by design, drives the vendor to win against competitors and perhaps even against the client’s procurement (in negotiations). It’s an adversarial start. Vendors may overpromise to score high, and clients may squeeze on price – seeds of future discord. One CEO remarked that traditional procurement can devolve into a “heads I win, tails you lose” contest, which is the opposite of a collaborative partnership . The RFP’s focus on measurable deliverables and price often means vendors are less inclined to go above-and-beyond later – why do extra if it’s not paid for or in the contract? On the flip side, clients might treat vendors as interchangeable suppliers rather than unique partners with valuable expertise.

This dynamic can be especially damaging in projects that need agile cooperation. For instance, implementing a new enterprise software isn’t just a transaction – success requires the vendor’s experts and your internal team to adapt and solve problems together. But if the relationship began with a strict RFP handshake, the vendor might just do exactly what’s required, and no more. The spirit of partnership never fully blossoms.

• Selecting the Relationship, Not Just a Product: Smart executives know that when you “buy” a vendor, you’re also choosing a relationship that will impact your business for years. A great cultural fit or a shared vision can be as important as technical specs.

Yet RFP scoring rarely captures “fit.” As a LinkedIn commentary noted, RFPs rank vendors on formal criteria, but “they don’t account for ‘fit’ between supplier and buyer”.

A proposal might look perfect in writing, but how will that company be to work with under pressure? Will they be responsive, flexible, candid? An RFP process usually can’t tell you. In fact, many RFP protocols forbid deep interpersonal interaction (to remain fair and impartial). The irony is you might eliminate the vendor who would have been a fantastic long-term partner simply because their paperwork wasn’t as glossy or they didn’t tick a minor box. Meanwhile, you might choose a vendor who excels at RFP-writing but treats you as just another account. This is how strategic initiatives turn into stagnant contracts. The human element – that spark of a potentially great partnership – gets lost in the sterile RFP shuffle.

🙅One industry survey revealed half of vendors won’t even respond to an RFP if they don’t already have a relationship with the client.

Think about that: the very vendors you’ve never worked with (i.e. new innovators) might refuse to engage, while only those who already know you (incumbents) play along.

That’s a recipe for maintaining status quo relationships, not forging new strategic ones.        

56% of vendors suspect that finalists are pre-selected before the RFP is issued.

(🤫 and some clients privately admit it)

In other words, many RFPs are just formalizing a decision that’s already been made via back-channel relationship-building. It’s transactional theatre.

Wouldn’t it be more productive to openly cultivate the partnerships and skip the charade?

4. The Unspoken Motive: RFPs as CYA and Political Cover

Here’s the dirty little secret many executives readily acknowledge in private: the RFP process is often a “cover-your-a**” mechanism. It provides political and paper trail cover in case things go wrong, rather than genuinely adding value. This isn’t usually stated on the record – after all, organizations claim RFPs are about fairness and rigor. But behind closed doors, how many times have you heard something like, “We’d better do an RFP so no one can question our choice”?

In fact, the modern RFP was essentially born as a CYA tool.

CYA: Cover Your A** 🫏        

As one sales veteran put it, “RFPs were invented to make the life of procurement easier and to provide the most amazing CYA 🍑ever invented”. By running a formal RFP, decision-makers can later deflect criticism: “Don’t blame us – the process chose the winner.” It’s a handy defense if a project tanks or if an executive is asked why they picked Vendor X over Y. You can point to the 👇👉scoring matrix, the committee decision, the thick binder of requirements. 👈👆

In other words, the RFP’s primary value becomes political insurance, not business outcomes.

Several manifestations of this phenomenon:

• “We followed the process” 😇 Syndrome: Especially in large enterprises or government settings, there’s immense pressure to demonstrate due diligence. Even if the team already has a preferred solution in mind (or a trusted incumbent vendor), they might still go through the motions of an RFP with multiple bidders. Also known as

“three-bids-and-a-buy”         

– you need at least 3 quotes to satisfy procurement policy, even if 2 are just for show. A public-sector IT manager candidly shared that “a good number [of RFPs] are rigged” 🤥with requirements that only one vendor can truly fulfill . It’s not done out of malice; often the agency genuinely believes that one vendor is the best choice. But they must issue an RFP to check the compliance box (or because regulations require competitive bidding). So they write specs tailor-made for that vendor. Nearly 60% of vendors say they suspect this kind of rigged outcome happens regularly.

🎬The RFP then is essentially theater – a cover story to award the contract to the already-chosen supplier. It’s a poorly kept secret in many industries.

• Avoiding Accountability: The flip side is when no one wants to stick their neck out on a risky decision, so they lean on an RFP. If an ambitious project fails, leaders can say, “Well, we followed the formal RFP process – it’s not like we just winged it!” It’s a way to diffuse blame. A CIO might instinctively know which cutting-edge startup’s solution could leapfrog the company ahead, but that feels like a gamble. Issuing an RFP and selecting a big, known vendor that checks all the boxes feels safer politically. Even if that big vendor’s solution underwhelms, at least the CIO can argue they did everything by the book.

It’s classic “no one gets fired for buying ADP” logic

– RFPs reinforce it by institutionalizing the safe choice. As a result, genuinely novel solutions often get sidelined; from a CYA perspective, picking an industry giant through an RFP is the less controversial path. The organization might miss out on a breakthrough, but the decision-makers protect themselves.

• Internal Politics and “Fairness”: Sometimes RFPs are used to appease internal factions. Imagine a scenario: a department head really wants Vendor A, but another executive is lobbying for Vendor B (perhaps due to a prior relationship or preference). How to settle the debate? Call for an RFP and let the “objective” process decide. It creates an appearance of fairness and neutrality in a political tug-of-war. In reality, of course, how the RFP is written can skew it one way or the other – but it gives everyone involved an out. The loser can accept the result because “the impartial committee chose,” and the winner gets their choice validated. This might keep the peace internally, but it’s again a case of serving the politics, not necessarily the project.
• Management by Checklist: In some cultures, leaders default to RFPs for almost every major purchase simply because it’s the path of least resistance administratively. It’s a convenient checklist exercise: did we follow the procurement manual? Yes. Any CFO or auditor asking questions later will see a nice file with all the proposals and scores. Never mind that the chosen solution might have been attainable faster via a direct negotiation or that the requirements were outdated – the important thing (to them) is that no one can say proper process wasn’t followed. One procurement insider wryly called this “procurement theatre”, where the RFP is more about optics and documentation than innovation . It’s like wearing a life jacket that you know is full of foam – it keeps you afloat in case of scrutiny, but it doesn’t actually steer the boat anywhere new.

Executives at the C-level are increasingly calling this out. They realize that an overreliance on formal RFPs can create a false sense of security. A process can be perfectly followed and still yield a terrible result. As one former CEO bluntly put it, “We checked all the boxes and still got it wrong.” The RFP binder may save you from hard questions in a board meeting, but it won’t save your business from a bad investment.

Leaders are learning to ask: are we doing this RFP to get a great outcome, or just to cover our butts?

If it’s the latter, maybe it’s time to rethink the approach entirely.

Conclusion: R.I.P. 🪦 RFP

🫄Request For Solution         

It’s clear the traditional RFP process is a hinderance – a ritual we perform because “that’s how it’s always been done,” even as we curse under our breath about how broken it feels. General Electric’s former CEO Jack Welch used to warn against “managing to the manual” – focusing on process over results. The RFP, in many organizations, has become exactly that kind of manual. And as we’ve seen, it often backfires: poor outcomes, stifled creativity, purely transactional vendor interactions, and a hidden agenda of CYA rather than bold decision-making.

So what’s the alternative? Forward-thinking leaders are experimenting with new ways to source ideas and solutions.

The Ambassadors are replacing the old RFP with more collaborative “Request for Solution” dialogues – essentially telling vendors the problem and letting them co-design the fix.

Others use pilot projects, hackathons, or agile workshops to vet vendors in action, rather than judging them on paperwork. There’s a growing recognition that partnerships can’t be jump-started by a 50-page PDF – they’re built through conversation, trust, and shared risk-taking. In one survey, the use of request for solution process coincided with a jump in satisfaction – from only 35% satisfied to 64% within a year . Change is possible.

At the end of the day, executives driving transformation are asking a simple but powerful question: Is our buying process helping us or hampering us? If the honest answer is the latter, it might be time to kill the RFP-as-we-know-it (or at least put it on a strict diet) and try something new. As one procurement reform advocate declared,

“The RFP’s time has come. Let’s take the sucker behind the shed and do what should have been done a long time ago.”

(Graphic, but you get the point!)

While we might not need to be that extreme in reality, we do need to be bold in reimagining how buyers and sellers come together. Because if we keep relying on the same old RFP process, we’ll keep getting the same underwhelming results – and in today’s fast-paced world, that’s a risk no savvy leader should be willing to take.

LinkedIn readers:         

What do you think? Have you seen RFPs go off the rails, or do you have success stories defying these trends? Are there better ways you’ve used to find great partners and solutions?

I invite you to share your experiences – especially the war stories! – and let’s spark a conversation!

#PeoplePurposePosition

#fowardtogether #RIPRFP #PartnerNotVendor #BusinessTransformation #LeadershipInsights #changemanagement