According to procurement research tracked by VisibleThread and others, roughly 4% of proposals are still disqualified for failing to include required documents or sections. That number used to be closer to 15%. It's come down, but it still means firms are losing opportunities to errors that have nothing to do with the quality of their work.
The most common reasons are not surprising: missing a mandatory form, using the wrong client name from a copy-paste, leaving outdated project details in a section pulled from a previous submission, or not addressing a specific evaluation criterion that the committee is scoring against.
Evaluation committees score proposals against specific criteria, often with disclosed weights (for example, 40% technical approach, 30% relevant experience, 20% team qualifications, 10% fee). A study by Inventive AI and Hudson Bid Writers found that firms frequently spend equal time on every section instead of weighting their effort toward the highest-scored criteria. The result is a proposal that "checks the boxes" but doesn't score well where it matters most.
Procore's research on common RFP mistakes found that many proposals stop short of explaining why the team is the best choice for the project, missing the chance to connect their specific experience to what the evaluator is actually looking for.
According to Zweig Group's research on QA practices in architecture firms, fewer than half of firms that claim to have a quality review process actually use it. Proposals are typically finished under time pressure, reviewed briefly by whoever is available, and submitted. The structured, criteria-by-criteria review that would catch most of these errors rarely happens because there isn't time.
This is what we built the submission review feature in ArchFP to solve. Upload your draft proposal alongside the RFP documents, and the system scores your response against each evaluation criterion, flags missing requirements, identifies gaps where you could score higher, and estimates how an evaluation committee would rate your submission. It takes a few minutes instead of the hour-long review that nobody has time for.
If your firm's final review process is a quick skim before the deadline, book a 15-minute demo and we'll show you what a structured pre-submission check looks like.