Before You Publish the RFP, Make Sure the Question Makes Sense

Before You Publish the RFP, Make Sure the Question Makes Sense

Before You Publish the RFP, Make Sure the Question Makes Sense

An RFP question can be grammatically correct and still be a bad question.

It can contain all the expected terminology. It can sound formal. It can survive several rounds of internal review.

And suppliers can still have no idea what you actually want them to answer.

That matters because the quality of an RFP response depends heavily on the quality of the request behind it. When a question is vague, overloaded, contradictory, or disconnected from the evaluation criteria, respondents are forced to interpret intent instead of simply answering.

Different suppliers interpret that ambiguity differently.

The result is often a stack of responses that are technically compliant but difficult to compare.

A question should produce decision-useful information

Before publishing an RFP, look at each question from the evaluator’s perspective.

Ask:

If five qualified suppliers answer this question well, will their answers give us information we can actually compare?

If the answer is no, the question probably needs more work.

Consider a request such as:

Describe your approach to implementation.

That sounds reasonable, but what does the organization actually need to know?

Timeline?

Governance?

Staffing?

Dependencies?

Customer responsibilities?

Risk management?

Data migration?

Training?

Testing?

Change management?

All of them?

A supplier may provide three pages about project methodology while another concentrates on staffing and a third emphasizes technical deployment. Each may have answered the question appropriately, yet the evaluation team still lacks comparable information.

The problem did not begin in the responses.

It began in the RFP.

Broad questions create broad answers

There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing suppliers room to explain their solution. Problems arise when broad questions are expected to produce precise evaluation data.

If implementation timing is important, ask about timing.

If responsibilities matter, ask respondents to identify responsibilities.

If risk is part of the score, ask how implementation risks will be identified, escalated, and managed.

Instead of:

Describe your implementation approach.

Consider:

Describe your proposed implementation approach, including major phases, estimated timeline, key supplier and customer responsibilities, significant dependencies, and how implementation risks will be identified and managed.

Now respondents know what information the evaluation team expects.

More importantly, evaluators know where to look for it.

Watch for questions hiding multiple questions

Another common problem is the RFP question that quietly contains six separate requests.

For example:

Describe your solution, implementation process, account management model, training program, reporting capabilities, and approach to continuous improvement.

That is not one question.

It is six subjects sharing a sentence.

Responses to questions like this become difficult to navigate because suppliers must decide how to organize several unrelated topics beneath one response heading. Evaluators then hunt through paragraphs trying to locate individual pieces of information.

If the subjects will be evaluated separately, they should usually be asked separately.

A clearer structure might include:

• Solution overview
• Implementation
• Account management
• Training
• Reporting
• Continuous improvement

The RFP becomes slightly longer.

The evaluation process becomes considerably easier.

Test questions before release

One of the simplest quality checks is also one of the most useful: have someone who did not write the question read it.

Do not explain what you meant.

Just ask:

What information would you provide if you had to answer this?

If their interpretation is substantially different from yours, a supplier may interpret it differently too.

You can also compare the question against the scoring criteria.

If evaluators are expected to score something that the RFP never clearly asks suppliers to address, the process is already misaligned.

Likewise, if a question requests information that has no meaningful role in evaluation or decision-making, ask why suppliers are being required to provide it.

Every requirement adds work on both sides.

Clarity helps suppliers, but it also helps evaluators

Clear RFPs are sometimes treated as a courtesy to respondents.

They are more than that.

Clarity improves the buyer’s own process.

A well-structured question produces responses that are easier to:

• compare
• score
• discuss
• defend
• reference during negotiations
• translate into implementation expectations

It also reduces clarification questions during the solicitation period and lowers the chance that evaluators will have to infer whether a supplier meets an unstated expectation.

The goal is not to tell suppliers what to say

There is an important distinction between creating a clear question and prescribing the answer.

An RFP should not force every supplier into identical language or prevent meaningful differentiation.

The goal is to make the information requirement clear while still allowing suppliers to explain how their approach, experience, or solution differs.

Good RFP structure creates a common frame.

Suppliers provide the substance within it.

Before you press Publish

Before releasing the next RFP, review the questions one more time — not for spelling, formatting, or whether they sound sufficiently formal.

Review them for meaning.

Ask what information each question is intended to produce.

Ask how that information will be evaluated.

Ask whether a supplier unfamiliar with your internal discussions could reasonably understand what you need.

Because if the question does not make sense before the RFP is published, the response process will not magically make it clearer.

And evaluators should not have to decode the answers to discover what they meant to ask in the first place.

Want to see what evaluator-friendly structure looks like in practice? Explore WriteRFP resources designed to help teams create clearer RFPs and stronger, easier-to-evaluate responses.