A vendor search for an incentive program is one of the bigger decisions that a procurement team will make, and the RFP is where that whole process either comes together or breaks down. Most buyers send out a loosely written document and get back proposals that are all over the place (with different scope, different formats and different pricing structures), which makes a direct comparison nearly impossible. A vague RFP will usually generate vague replies, and vague replies mean your team ends up looking for answers that should have been in the document from the start.
Without goals, well-defined service expectations and a standard response format, every vendor is left to fill in the gaps on their own. One vendor might quote a flat platform fee, and another spreads those exact same costs across five separate line items. One submits a 40-page deck, and another sends back two paragraphs. The pile of mismatched proposals that you’re left with just creates extra work.
A well-structured RFP prevents that before it can ever become a problem, and it also shows vendors that your organization is prepared and takes the process seriously, which alone tends to bring in much stronger replies. Criteria that are locked in from the start give your whole review team a shared foundation to work from, which makes it much harder for bias or last-minute pressure to change the final choice.
In my experience, a vendor search process is only as strong as how much care went into putting the document together.
Let’s get started on everything that goes into a winning RFP!
Set Your Program Goals Before You Write
Most teams would agree with that. It’s usually the step that gets rushed, though, and the final document shows it.
Without this part, an RFP tends to sprawl in two directions at once and ends up as a document that loosely touches on employee engagement, sales performance and customer loyalty all at the same time, without ever committing to any of them. Vendors who read it can’t quite tell what actually matters most to you, which makes their proposals harder to sort through and compare.
The biggest question to ask before writing an RFP (and the most skipped-over one) is what behavior you want to change. “Improve morale” and “drive up sales” are valid goals. But they’re results – not behaviors. The actual question is what you want more of or differently. That distinction is what separates a genuinely helpful RFP from one that just generates a pile of vague proposals that are hard to act on.
You should ask yourself where the pressure to stay vague is coming from – and the answer is usually more internal than external. In most cases, the team just hasn’t quite settled on what matters to you the most. In other cases, it’s a reluctance to finalize details too early. A well-defined goal gives vendors something concrete to work with and respond to. The more detail you can give at this stage, the stronger the proposals you’ll get back. Vendors want to know what success looks like for your team. Laying that out makes the whole process more productive for everyone.
Map Out All the Services You Need
With your goals locked in, the next step is to look at the specifics of what you need a vendor to cover – it’s where so many RFPs start to fall apart. It’s not usually a problem with the goals themselves – the issue is that the services never quite get spelled out well enough.
Incentive programs have a lot of moving parts. A technology platform to run the whole operation, a fulfillment and delivery system for rewards, staff to manage the day-to-day administration and a reporting dashboard to track your results – these are all pretty common pieces of the picture. Whether your program ends up needing every one of them or just one or two can depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.
Something to look at is how differently vendors bundle their services. What one vendor labels as “full service” can be missing something that matters to you. If your RFP doesn’t spell this out well, then you’ll be in a long exchange just to sort out a baseline – it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Vendors can only give you a proposal if they have enough detail about what you need – what they’ll own and what falls outside of their scope. Be open about which parts your team plans to manage in-house versus which ones you want the vendor to take on. That keeps every proposal grounded in reality, and when it’s time to compare them side by side, the whole process gets quite a bit easier.
Something to include in your RFP at this stage is a section on flexibility. Programs change (sometimes quite a bit), and a vendor who can scale up or down as needs shift is worth far more than one who locks you into a rigid package from day one.
With your service needs figured out, the next section will cover how to structure your pricing questions.
Ask Vendors for a Clear Cost Breakdown
Hidden costs are one of the biggest frustrations that procurement teams run into after a vendor contract gets signed. A price that looked fine during the selection process has a way of looking very different once platform fees, per-user charges and reward markups all start showing up on invoices.
That’s why your RFP needs to go deeper than just asking for a general price estimate. What you actually want is a full itemized list of costs from each vendor – every line item that goes into running the program, from setup charges and platform fees to any markup that they’re adding on top of rewards or merchandise.
A pricing table built directly into your RFP document is one of the most effective tools that you have for this. The idea is to give every vendor the same structured template to fill out so all their submissions come back in the same format. From there, it’s much easier to compare the proposals side by side – and you won’t have to spend time decoding each vendor’s own way of laying out their numbers. Every vendor has their own way of presenting this, and I can tell you it gets old fast.
When vendors have a full picture of what’s expected of them from the start, they’re much less likely to miss anything. If something does get missed, at least it surfaces as a conversation before anyone signs a contract – not after.
A word of advice on your RFP language – be direct about what you need and don’t leave room for ambiguity. Vendors need to know from the start that incomplete pricing submissions will not move forward in the review process. A firm instruction like that sets a strong standard and shows vendors that you’re all about transparency from day one. Some vendors will probably test that boundary if you give them any wiggle room, which means the more explicit your expectations are at the start, the better.
Ask for Case Studies That Match Your Goals
One of the best ways to separate the strong candidates from the ones who just look right on paper is to ask vendors for their case studies. A long client list doesn’t tell you much about whether a vendor has done work like yours before.
Experience in sales incentive programs doesn’t automatically translate to employee wellness initiatives. That gap is real. Every program has its own goals, its own audience and its own definition of what success actually looks like. A vendor who’s strong in one area can still fall short in the other. That difference tends to show up most when it’s time to execute.
When a vendor walks you through their case studies, push past the storytelling and ask them for numbers. Ask what the program was supposed to accomplish and whether it got there. A vendor who fumbles on that is already telling you something.
It can also help to lead with your goals first. Say so right at the start if your program is meant to drive a particular behavior or hit a measurable target – then ask each vendor to show you where they’ve done something similar before. A vendor who can talk you through concrete results from a situation that looks like yours is a much safer choice than one who shows up with a polished portfolio and not much substance behind it.
One more point worth mentioning – be sure that you look past vague language about “improved engagement” or “exceeded expectations” in a case study. What you most want to know is what the goal was, what they measured and whether the numbers moved in the right direction. In my experience, vendors who are worth your time will have no problem answering those questions directly – and the ones who stay vague are usually vague for a reason.
Set Up a Scorecard Before the Demo
A polished demo can do unearned work if your team doesn’t have an evaluation framework in place before the meeting. Vendors know how to put on a very strong show, and one flashy feature tends to overshadow everything else in the room. Without a pre-built structure to reference, your team ends up with a feeling instead of a fair comparison of the options. A scoring framework built before you talk to a single vendor gives you something to return to after each conversation.
Internal pressure can also derail an evaluation process, and it comes up in just about every group choice at some point. A weighted scoring system gives everyone something concrete and fact-based to point to when opinions get heated or when someone with a little more pull in the room starts to push their preferred option – and it’s not about distrust at all. It’s just a way to keep the whole process on track and fair. The scores don’t make the final call. But they do give your team a shared reference point that’s quite a bit harder to argue with than a gut feeling.
If long-term support quality is what your program lives or dies by, it should carry more points than a polished user interface. Whatever your program needs to run well, that’s what should shape how you build your scorecard. Run vendors through a system like this, and they’ll start to look very different from each other – it’s right where you want to be.
Make Your RFP Easy to Read
The way you put together your RFP document sends a message long before vendors even start to read it. A well-organized document lets them know immediately that you know what you want. That you’ll be easy to work with. That impression can affect the quality of proposals that you get back from them.
Numbered sections are one of the simplest steps that you can take to keep an RFP organized, and the payoff is pretty immediate. Vendors get an easy-to-follow path, and your team has a much easier time comparing the answers side by side. When every vendor answers question four in the same place, you spend much less time hunting for information and more time going through it.
It also pays to keep your question formats the same throughout the document. When some questions ask for a full paragraph, and others just want a number or a rating, vendors will have to guess at what you actually need from them. A response template solves that problem neatly – vendors have a format to follow, and your answers come back already lined up and ready for you to compare.
The structure of your document also sends a quiet message about who you are as a buyer. A disorganized RFP can make vendors wonder whether the project itself will be just as messy. A clean document does the opposite – it builds confidence that the partnership will be worth their effort. Vendors invest genuine effort into their strongest proposals, and they’re more likely to bring that energy when the buyer comes across as organized and prepared.
Vendors talk – and in this industry, the word travels fast.
Avoid the Most Common RFP Mistakes
Before the RFP goes out, a few areas are worth covering – some common mistakes usually surface right at this stage of the process.
One of the most common problems with the specs is that they get written too rigidly. When the specs pin down everything about how a system should work, vendors have very little room to bring their own ideas to the table – and what you’re left with is a shortlist of technically compliant proposals that all miss the bigger opportunity.
Timelines are another area where the whole process can quietly fall apart. A rushed RFP puts vendors in a very tough position, and the quality of their proposals will show it.
One detail RFP writers leave out is a dedicated Q&A period. Without one, vendors are left to either guess at what you mean or send you a steady stream of one-off questions over email. A dedicated Q&A window keeps it fair across all your vendors and cuts down on unnecessary back and forth.
It can be tempting to grab a generic RFP template, fill in the blanks and move on – but incentive programs have a very different set of needs than, say, a software procurement project – and a mismatched template just won’t ask the right questions. When a vendor gets an RFP that doesn’t quite fit what you’re asking of them, it raises some questions about whether you actually know what you want – that doubt alone can cost you their best work.
You just need to know what to look for.
Level Up Your Incentives and Rewards
What you put into a document has a way of coming right back to you in the quality of the answers that you get. Vendors can tell when a buyer has done their homework – and they will usually put in more effort when they see that the buyer already has. That alone is what makes the whole process worth the extra time. The time that you take to think through what you’re after and write it down goes a long way toward attracting vendors who are legitimately a fit for what you need.
At the end of the day, the most reliable way to find the right vendor is genuine honesty about what your program needs. That should come before you ever talk to anyone. The more precise and open you are about what you’re looking for, the smoother the whole process tends to go (for your internal team and for every vendor who ends up submitting a proposal). It also helps to have your internal team aligned on goals ahead of time so there’s less friction once proposals start to come in.
A vendor relationship is only the starting point – and if you pick the right one, your program can do a whole lot more for your business than just check a box. At Level 6, we partner with businesses to build incentive programs that drive results that actually matter, whether that’s sales performance, employee engagement, recognition or a combination of all three. The right partner will also grow with you as your program evolves – and that makes a real difference over time.
A free demo is the best way to see just how this fits into your team’s day-to-day. There’s no obligation, and it only takes about 30 minutes to get a picture of what’s possible. Get in touch with us, and we’ll show you what the right incentive program can do for your business.