Evaluation criteria are the factors and subfactors the government uses to assess proposals and select a contractor. They are defined in Section M of the solicitation and are the single most important text in the entire RFP for win-strategy purposes. Common factors include technical approach, past performance, price, management approach, key personnel, and small business participation.
The relative importance of factors — for example, "technical is significantly more important than price, and past performance is approximately equal to technical" — drives how a competitive proposal should be structured. In a technically weighted source selection, the proposal should invest in differentiation, discriminators, and substantiation. In an LPTA evaluation, the proposal should prioritize compliance, clarity, and price minimization without sacrificing minimum acceptable performance.
Evaluation criteria are the blueprint for win themes. Every discriminator should map directly to a stated or inferred evaluation priority. A win theme that doesn't trace to Section M is a wasted page. Capture teams who reverse-engineer the evaluation criteria into a proposal compliance matrix and a win-theme map produce proposals that score well, while teams that write to a generic template produce proposals that compete on volume rather than substance.