Your information lives everywhere: CRM records in Salesforce, product usage logs in your data warehouse, customer support history in Zendesk, and marketing performance in HubSpot. On paper, you have rich intelligence. In practice, your teams pull manual exports, wait on engineering tickets, and make decisions based on information that was stale before the meeting started.
You've decided a data integration platform is the answer. Now comes the hard part: choosing between vendors who all claim to do the same thing while pricing, architecture, scalability, and support quality vary enormously. A structured RFP process cuts through the noise, forcing vendors to answer the same questions on your terms, in a format that supports side-by-side comparison.
This article gives you a complete, editable RFP template with tables you can adapt directly, plus the evaluation framework that separates genuinely capable vendors from those who just present well.
What a data integration RFP needs to accomplish
Most organizations send data integration RFPs that are too vague to be useful. "Tell us about your connectivity options" generates essays. "List every supported connector, its sync frequency, and whether it requires custom development" generates answers you can actually compare.
A well-designed RFP for data integration tools accomplishes four things. First, it forces your internal team to align on requirements before you talk to any vendor, a discipline that often surfaces disagreements about priorities that would have derailed procurement later. Second, it gives vendors enough context about your environment to propose solutions that actually fit. Third, it generates structured responses you can score consistently. Fourth, it creates documentation that justifies the final decision to stakeholders.
Keep the following principles in mind as you customize the template below:
- Be specific about your environment: Vague requirements produce vague responses. If your primary source is a Postgres database running on AWS with 500 million rows and sub-hourly sync requirements, say exactly that. The specificity filters out vendors who can't handle your scale before you've invested time in demos.
- Separate must-haves from nice-to-haves: Mark requirements as required, preferred, or optional. This prevents vendors from inflating scores by claiming partial credit for capabilities you don't actually need.
- Ask for evidence, not claims: "Are you SOC 2 certified?" gets a yes. "Provide your most recent SOC 2 Type II attestation report and its coverage period" gets proof.
Data integration RFP template
Use the sections below as your working template. Each table is editable, add rows for connectors specific to your stack, remove sections that don't apply, and adjust the scoring weights in the evaluation matrix to reflect your organization's priorities.
Section 1: Company overview and submission details
Vendor instructions: Submit responses in this document's format. Do not reorganize sections. Answer each question directly. Attach supporting documentation where requested — do not substitute attachments for written answers.
Section 2: Vendor background
Provide concise responses to each item. Attach any requested documentation as labeled appendices.
Section 3: Technical requirements
3a. Connector coverage
For each source and destination below, indicate whether it is Native (built and maintained by your team), Partner (third-party maintained), or Custom (requiring development work and at what cost).
3b. Data transformation and processing
3c. Performance and scale
Section 4: Security and compliance
Section 5: Deployment and operations
Section 6: Pricing structure
Standardizing pricing responses is essential for accurate total cost of ownership comparison. Complete all fields.
Additional pricing questions:
- What triggers overage charges, and what are the rates?
- Are connector costs included in the base license or metered separately?
- What is your pricing model for development and staging environments?
- Describe any volume discount thresholds and their terms.
Section 7: Evaluation scoring matrix
Before proposals arrive, assign weights to each category based on your organization's priorities. Score each vendor 1–5 per category, then multiply by the weight for a weighted score.
Adjust category weights before distributing the RFP. If security certifications are non-negotiable for regulatory reasons, increase that weight and treat any gap as an automatic disqualifier rather than a scored category.
How to evaluate vendor responses?
Receiving proposals is the beginning of the evaluation process, not the end. Strong RFP responses don't always predict strong implementations, and weak proposals from capable vendors sometimes reflect resource constraints rather than product limitations.
Structure your evaluation in three passes.
- First pass: Completeness and compliance. Discard responses that skip sections, substitute attachments for direct answers, or fail to meet your stated non-negotiable requirements. A vendor who can't follow submission instructions is signaling something about how they'll manage implementation.
- Second pass: Technical depth. Score connector coverage, transformation capabilities, performance specifications, and security documentation independently using your weighted matrix. Have your engineering team review technical sections before commercial stakeholders weigh in on pricing. These evaluations should happen separately to prevent pricing bias from contaminating the technical assessments.
- Third pass: Reference validation. Call every reference, not just the ones vendors suggest. Ask what went wrong during implementation, how the vendor responded to incidents, and whether they would choose the same platform again. This question reliably surfaces the information vendors edit out of case studies.
One signal worth watching: response accuracy and specificity. Vendors who respond with source-cited answers, rather than generic marketing language, demonstrate the operational rigor you want in an integration partner. Leading bid and proposal teams that handle high RFP volumes use AI platforms to assemble responses that directly mirror your requirements, cite documentation accurately, and flag gaps honestly. When a data integration vendor takes 4 weeks to respond to a 50-question RFP, that timeline itself is a signal of their internal maturity.
Best practices for running the process
- Set a realistic timeline: Data integration RFPs are technically dense. Give vendors three to four weeks to respond. Rushed responses produce generic answers that waste your evaluation time.
- Standardize your question and answer process: Publish a single deadline for vendor questions and distribute all answers to all participating vendors simultaneously. This prevents information advantages and keeps your team from answering the same question repeatedly.
- Run a proof of concept before finalizing: After written proposals, require your top 2 or 3 vendors to connect to your actual source systems and build a test pipeline in your production environment. Demo environments with synthetic data tell you almost nothing about production performance.
- Involve the team that will own the platform: Engineers who maintain pipelines, analysts who consume the information, and the security team, which will approve deployments. All evaluate proposals differently. Build this cross-functional perspective into scoring rather than funneling evaluation through a single procurement stakeholder.
- Document your decision rationale: Record why you selected the vendor you selected, specific scores, key differentiators, and risks accepted. This protects the decision from second-guessing after signature and becomes valuable context at renewal.
Responding to data integration RFPs: How vendors can close the gap
If your team is on the vendor side, responding to data integration RFPs rather than writing them, the template above illustrates exactly what buyers want: specific, evidenced, section-by-section answers that make comparison straightforward.
The challenge most data integration vendors face is volume. Presales and solutions teams fielding these RFPs must coordinate answers across engineering, security, legal, and product, pulling documentation from Confluence, SharePoint, Salesforce, and past questionnaire responses, while managing multiple live RFPs simultaneously. The result is either a slow turnaround that costs deals or rushed responses that fail the technical depth test.
SiftHub is an AI RFP software that works alongside your team to eliminate this bottleneck. Rather than hunting across systems for the right certification document or correct connector specification, the tool’s response generation capability maps each incoming RFP question to connected company knowledge living in your knowledge base, Drive, SharePoint, and tools like Notion or Confluence, auto-filling 90% of standard questions with source-cited answers in minutes, not days.
The buyers using the template above are evaluating your response speed alongside your technical answers. A complete, accurate, well-organized proposal submitted on time is itself a proof point of how you'll operate as an implementation partner. SiftHub turns that proof point from a function of how much time your team can afford to spend into a consistent, repeatable capability. Book a demo to see how your team handles data integration RFPs at scale.
