How Often Companies Respond to RFPs
Loopio’s 2026 Trends Report, developed with the Association of Proposal Management Professionals and built on a survey of 1,500-plus companies plus an analysis of more than 250,000 RFPs, found the average company submits 166 RFP responses a year. Management Consulting firms lead every industry measured at 229 a year, the highest volume in the report.
The same report names Advertising, Media, and Comms as one of six industries it breaks out individually, the classification that covers marketing agencies and media companies responding to RFPs as sellers. That segment posts the fastest average RFP turnaround time of any industry in the report, at 22 hours, faster than the cross-industry average.
What Loopio’s Data Doesn’t Cover, and What Already Fills the Gap
Loopio’s report measures volume and turnaround, not win rate, and its Advertising, Media, and Comms segment did not surface a dedicated win-rate figure in what this research could retrieve. That is a real gap in a single-report sense, but the agency-selling side of this question already has published, sourced win-rate data elsewhere: R3 Worldwide’s tracking put the average 2024 agency pitch win rate at 22% overall, dropping to 19% for mid-sized agencies specifically, while a separate 2026 benchmark from Pitchsite puts the blended average at 43%, ranging from 33% for PR agencies to 52% for branding and creative agencies.
Neither R3 nor Pitchsite scopes its win-rate figure to formal RFP responses specifically, both measure agency proposals broadly, so treat the RFP-volume data above and the win-rate data below as two related but separately measured pictures of the same broader pitch process, not one combined statistic.
The Numbers
Companies submit an average of 166 RFP responses a year across all industries surveyed; Management Consulting firms lead at 229 a year, the highest volume measured.
Advertising, Media, and Comms, the industry classification covering agencies that respond to RFPs as sellers, posts the fastest average RFP turnaround time of any industry measured, at 22 hours.
92% of software-industry RFP teams now use AI somewhere in their RFP process, and “bandwidth,” meaning team capacity, is the number one challenge RFP teams report, the first time capacity has topped that list in the report’s history.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.
- Loopio, 2026 Trends Report
- eweek.wfglobal.org, citing R3 Worldwide
- Pitchsite, 2026 agency proposal benchmarks