Why Most RFP Decisions Still Happen in Excel (Despite Your Fancy Software)

Introduction

It is a scenario that plays out in procurement and proposal teams every day. An organization invests heavily in a comprehensive RFP software suite, promising to centralize every aspect of the bidding process. Yet, when the deadline looms and the final decision needs to be made, the team abandons the proprietary dashboard and exports everything they can to Excel - filling in the gaps for what they could not get out (ugh).

This phenomenon is not a failure of user adoption; it is a rational response to the limitations of "walled garden" software. The question "Why does our team export everything to Excel?" highlights a fundamental disconnect between how software is sold and how high-stakes decisions are actually made. Teams gravitate toward spreadsheets because they offer the flexibility, transparency, and accessibility that rigid platforms often lack.

TL;DR: Key Takeaways

The Excel Reality: Decision-makers inevitably return to spreadsheets because they need to add custom criteria, combine data sources, and share and collaborate on findings with non-platform users.
The "Collaboration Penalty": Seat-based pricing models lock out key stakeholders (like SMEs and executives), forcing teams to export data so others can review it.
Trust Issues: Teams often resist making million-dollar decisions inside proprietary "black boxes," preferring the transparency and auditability of their own spreadsheet models.
The BidHawk AI Approach: Instead of fighting this behavior, BidHawk AI was designed to support "Excel" rather than avoid it. BidHawk AI automates the analysis and exports structured, decision-ready data directly to the format you already use.

The Excel Inevitability: Where Decisions Actually Happen

Despite the promise of all-in-one platforms, Excel remains the "inevitable" destination for RFP and proposal analysis data. This occurs because decision-making is rarely a linear process that fits into a pre-defined workflow.

Flexibility vs. Rigidity

Proprietary dashboards force users to evaluate proposals based on the vendor's framework. However, buyers often need to apply custom weighting, combine RFP scores with external financial data, or visualize risks in a specific way. Spreadsheets allow for this ad-hoc modeling; rigid software suites do not.

The "Walled Garden" Problem

Large platforms attempt to trap data within their ecosystem to ensure stickiness and proclaim future successes based on an ever increasing corpus of data. However, procurement decisions often require input from stakeholders who do not - and should not - have logins to the RFP platform software. To get a sign-off from the CFO or Legal, the data must be exported to save time and money. If the software makes this difficult, it becomes a hindrance rather than a help.

Collaboration Barriers: The High Cost of "Seats"

One of the primary drivers of the "export culture" is the economic model of traditional software. Many platforms charge significant fees per user (often hundreds of dollars per month). This creates a "collaboration penalty".

The Exclusion of SMEs: Because licenses are expensive, companies restrict access to a few "power users." Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), whose input is often critical, are often locked out because of cost, time, and process burdens to participate.
The Workaround: To get feedback, the power user exports the data to Excel and emails it to the SMEs. The collaboration happens in the spreadsheet, not the platform, rendering the platform's collaboration features useless while existing office platforms like Google Workspace, Office 365, etc. are the expected path for engagement.
The BidHawk AI Difference: BidHawk AI utilizes a credit-based model rather than seat licenses. This removes the financial penalty for collaboration, allowing unlimited stakeholders to review the results via shared PDF or Excel reports.

Platform Lock-In Resistance: Trusting the Data

When millions of dollars are on the line, trust is paramount. Procurement teams are often reluctant to rely on a proprietary system's internal scoring algorithm for the final decision.

There is a natural resistance to "platform lock-in" for final awards. Teams want to see the raw data and manipulate it themselves to ensure the scoring is robust and defensible. They need to own the decision logic, which means they need the data in a format they control - typically a spreadsheet. BidHawk AI addresses this by providing cited executive summaries and supporting data analysis results that link scores back to the source text, offering transparency rather than a "black box" recommendation.

Where BidHawk AI Fits In: Support Excel - don’t replace it!

BidHawk AI takes a different approach by validating what teams are already doing rather than fighting it. Large and small organizations use spreadsheets for most of their collaboration and decisions - BidHawk AI results can be exported to Excel and easily shared and enhanced in your corporate environments without additional cost. BidHawk AI results are designed to feed your decision-making process, not replace it.

Automating the "Messy Middle"

Manual data entry into Excel is slow and error-prone ("spreadsheet hell"). BidHawk AI automates this step. It acts as a "Digital Subject Matter Expert," analyzing, scoring, and ranking proposals against your requirements - giving you and your team the data needed in a format you want to quickly prioritize your reviews and engagements.

Structured Exports for Immediate Use

Instead of trapping insights in a dashboard, BidHawk AI is designed to generate Excel-ready reports and cited data from Day 1.

Ranked Lists: It outputs scored and ranked vendor proposal results based on your specific RFP criteria.
Compliance Tagging: It categorizes responses as "Compliant," "Needs Negotiation," or "Subjective," allowing you to filter for risks immediately in your spreadsheet.
Portable Data: The system produces downloadable PDF and Excel files that can be uploaded to your existing environments (SharePoint, Google Drive) or emailed to stakeholders without extra cost or overheads.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. Is exporting to Excel a "bad practice"?

Not inherently. The bad practice is manually typing data into Excel, which leads to errors and fatigue. Using an AI tool to automatically extract, score, and structure the data for Excel ensures accuracy while maintaining the flexibility you need for strategic decision-making.

2. Why don't traditional platforms integrate better with Excel?

Many platforms view Excel as a competitor - lightly supporting, never perfectly. They want you to stay inside their interface to justify the subscription cost. BidHawk AI views Excel as a partner, acknowledging that it is often the final destination for data.

3. Does BidHawk AI require me to change my workflow?

No. It is designed to augment your existing workflow. You drag and drop your documents to analyze them, and then take the structured results back to where you naturally work - whether that is Excel, email, or a cloud drive.

Actionable Takeaways

Accept the Reality: Stop trying to force your team to make final decisions inside a rigid software platform. Recognize that spreadsheets are often the most effective tool for complex, multi-variable decisions that require collaboration to increase the pace of delivery.
Automate the Input: Eliminate the manual data entry that makes spreadsheets painful. Use BidHawk AI to automatically score, rank, and extract proposal data into a structured format.
Democratize Data: Avoid tools with seat-based pricing that force you to hoard data. Choose consumption-based tools that allow you to share Excel exports and PDF summaries with unlimited stakeholders.
Focus on Analysis, Not Entry: Shift your team's effort from "spreadsheet archaeology" (finding the data) to strategic analysis (interpreting the data) by using BidHawk AI to handle the initial heavy lifting.