When a government agency reads your proposal, it does not grade it like a school essay. It scores it against a fixed set of rules that are printed in the RFP itself — the evaluation factors. These factors decide who wins, and understanding them before you write a single page is the difference between a proposal that scores well and one that never had a chance. Too many small contractors write a good proposal about their company and then discover the evaluators were looking for something else entirely. The evaluation factors tell you exactly what they were looking for.
Where to Find Them: Section M
Every federal RFP is built to a standard structure, and the evaluation factors live in Section M — Evaluation Factors for Award. Section M lists every factor the agency will score, the order of importance, and the basis on which the award will be made. Section L, the instructions to offerors, tells you how to organise your proposal so the evaluators can find each answer; Section M tells you what they will do with it once they find it. Read both together. If you have not yet worked through the RFP’s structure, read our guide on how to read an RFP section by section before you go further — Section M only makes sense once you can navigate the whole document.
Section M also states the award basis. The two most common are Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) and best value tradeoff. Under LPTA, the agency first checks whether your proposal meets every requirement, then awards to the lowest-priced acceptable offer — there is no extra credit for being excellent, only for being acceptable and cheap. Under best value tradeoff, the agency weighs technical merit, past performance and price against each other, and may pay more for a stronger proposal if the extra value justifies it. Your entire bid strategy changes with that one sentence, so find it before you decide whether to bid at all.
The Three Standard Factors
Most federal RFPs evaluate three factors, in roughly this order of importance: technical approach, past performance, and price. Technical approach is usually the most important. It asks: does your proposal show, in detail, that you understand the work and have a realistic plan to do it well? Evaluators look for a clear understanding of the statement of work, a workable staffing plan, a credible schedule, and evidence that you have thought about risks and how to handle them. Vague promises score badly. “We will provide excellent support” earns nothing; “Our team lead will hold a weekly quality review, measured against the three service levels in Section C, with results reported monthly” earns a strength.
Past performance is the agency’s look at your track record. Evaluators check contracts you have done that are similar in size, scope and complexity, and they look at how well you performed — usually through CPARS ratings, the government’s official performance record, and through questionnaires sent to your past customers. For a new small business with little federal history, this factor is the hardest, but it is not impossible: similar commercial work counts if the RFP allows it, and a strong technical proposal can partly offset a thin record. Keep your past performance references current, accurate and easy to verify, because an evaluator who cannot reach your reference scores you lower.
Price is scored last in most best-value competitions, but it is never ignored. The agency checks that your price is reasonable compared with the government’s own estimate and with other offers, and that it is realistic — a price so low it cannot possibly cover the work is a risk, not a bargain, and can be marked down for unrealism. Price must also match the structure in Section B: the right line items, the right quantities, and no arithmetic errors. A price volume that does not add up damages your credibility on every other factor.
How Evaluators Actually Score
Evaluators work from an evaluation plan the agency writes before the RFP is released. For each factor they identify strengths, weaknesses, significant weaknesses and deficiencies in your proposal, then assign an adjectival rating — typically Outstanding, Good, Acceptable, Marginal or Unacceptable for technical factors, and a confidence rating such as Substantial Confidence or Limited Confidence for past performance. A strength is something in your proposal that exceeds a requirement in a way that benefits the government. A weakness is a flaw that increases the risk of unsuccessful performance. A deficiency is a failure to meet a requirement at all, and a single deficiency can make a proposal unawardable.
This is why writing to the factors matters so much. Evaluators can only score what they can find, and they are not allowed to give you credit for something you did not write down. If the technical factor asks for your quality control plan, do not bury it in an appendix or mention it only in passing — give it a clearly labelled section in the technical volume, with a heading that uses the RFP’s own words. Mirror the RFP’s language: if Section M says “staffing approach,” use the heading “Staffing Approach,” not “Our Great Team.” Evaluators score against a checklist, and matching their words makes your strengths easy to find and easy to record.
Writing to Each Factor
Start by building a compliance matrix from Sections L and M — a simple table that lists every factor and subfactor, the volume and page where you answer it, and the requirement it maps to. This is the same discipline as a proposal compliance checklist, and it stops the most common scoring failure: answering a factor in the wrong volume, where the evaluator for that factor never sees it. Then, for each factor, write a section that opens with a direct answer to what the factor asks, follows with specific evidence — named staff, real experience, concrete processes — and closes by tying the answer back to a benefit for the government.
For the technical factor, be specific about how the work gets done: who does what, in what order, with what tools, and how you will know it is done right. For past performance, choose your three strongest relevant contracts, describe each in the same structure the RFP asks for — contract number, value, period, scope, and the customer’s contact — and pick references who will actually answer the phone. For price, show your work: labour categories and rates, hours that match your technical approach, and a narrative that explains why the price is what it is. If your technical approach promises ten engineers and your price volume pays for six, the evaluators will notice, and both volumes will suffer.
Tradeoffs and Common Mistakes
In a best-value competition, the agency writes a source selection decision that explains why the winner’s higher price was worth paying — or why it was not. Technical strengths that the government genuinely values can justify a price premium; strengths that are irrelevant to the mission cannot. That means you should invest your effort where Section M says the points are. If technical approach is significantly more important than price, a cheap proposal with a thin technical section loses. If price is the most important factor, an expensive proposal with gold-plated features loses. Read the stated order of importance and allocate your writing effort accordingly.
The most common mistakes are all avoidable. Writing a generic company brochure instead of answering the factors. Repeating marketing language in place of evidence. Ignoring a subfactor because it looked minor — every listed subfactor is scored. Putting price information in the technical volume, which can disqualify the proposal outright. And failing to answer a mandatory requirement in Section C, which is a deficiency regardless of how strong the rest of the proposal is. Each of these is a scoring failure, not a writing failure, and each is prevented by reading Section M first and writing to it throughout.
Finally, remember that evaluation factors are not a secret. The government is required to tell you what it will score and how. The contractors who win are usually not the ones with the longest track record — they are the ones who read Section M carefully, answered every factor directly, and made their strengths easy for a busy evaluator to find and record. Before you submit, read your draft the way an evaluator would: factor by factor, asking “did we answer this, and can I find it?” If the answer is yes for every factor, you have given your proposal its best possible score.
Related Guides
Evaluation Factors: Write to Win Them
Before you write a word of your proposal, read the evaluation factors in Section M and build your outline around them — every section of your proposal should answer one of the evaluation factors directly. When the evaluation factors rank technical approach first, put your strongest technical story first; when past performance outranks price, lead with proof, not discounts. Score yourself against the evaluation factors the way an evaluator would, and fix the weak spots before you submit — the evaluation factors reward proposals that mirror their order and language.
If you are new to reading solicitations, start with our guide on how to read an RFP section by section, then use the proposal compliance checklist to confirm every requirement is covered. The rules behind the evaluation factors come from FAR Part 15, which sets out how agencies evaluate proposals and make source selection decisions.
3 Responses