The world of procurement may seem to be entirely straightforward. An agency needs goods or services and works with a procurement department to buy the highest quality for the lowest cost. Simple purchases – like laptops – can be obtained by simply putting out a request for bids, with clear cut explanations of what’s being acquired, and then the lowest bidder typically will get the deal.

But for more complex purchases, state and local governments turn to requests for proposals (RFPs) which can include hundreds of pages of details which vendors attempt to understand and then offer up a compelling response in hopes that they’ll wind up sealing the deal. “I would say over 50% of procurements are done through RFPS in big governments especially,” says David Gragan a long-time procurement director for a number of entities. “We do more proposals now than we have historically done. Years ago, maybe 90% of our transactions were put out to bid and the rest were proposals.”

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