The RFP Process Most Brands Get Wrong, And How to Fix It

An RFP is supposed to help you find the best partner. Most of them do the opposite, they select for whoever writes the best pitch.

A Writing Competition, Not a Selection Process

Run enough agency RFPs and a pattern shows up: the process claims to select for capability, but it actually selects for whoever wrote the best response. Agencies spend two or three weeks producing a document engineered to impress a committee that, more often than not, hasn't agreed internally on what "impress" should mean. The polished deck wins. Or the familiar name wins. Or the agency whose new business lead built the best rapport during the pitch wins. None of those are illegitimate reasons to feel good about a decision. None of them tell you whether the agency can do the work.

This isn't a case of anyone being lazy or cynical. Procurement teams are stretched thin, evaluation criteria get written in a hurry, and the people scoring responses are usually looking for a reason to feel confident about a choice rather than a method for testing fit. The process is thorough in appearance and close to random in outcome. If you've ever signed a major agency contract and regretted it within two quarters, the fault line was almost always visible at the RFP stage. You just weren't looking for it yet.

Where the Brief Breaks Down

The brief is the single most consequential document in the whole process, and it's usually the weakest. Most run too long, describe the business at length without naming the actual problem, and list objectives generic enough to apply to any company in any category ("drive awareness, grow consideration, convert customers"). Case study requests ask for broad evidence of capability rather than specific proof of work in a genuinely comparable situation.

Agencies respond to what they're given. A vague brief gets filled in with whatever makes the agency look strongest on paper, which tells you a great deal about their pitch craft and almost nothing about their fit for your specific problem. A sharp brief names the actual tension in the business, states what success looks like in terms you could put a number on, and scopes the work tightly enough that two agencies' responses can be compared on the same axis rather than two different interpretations of the assignment. It should also be short. If a brief is long enough that the agency principal delegates reading it to a junior account person, you've already lost some of the signal you were trying to capture.

Decide How You're Scoring Before You Send It

Most organizations build the brief first and figure out scoring later, sometimes after responses have already landed. That ordering is backwards. Before anything goes out, the people running the process need to agree, in writing, on what they're actually buying: strategic capability, creative quality, operational capacity, price, chemistry, or some specific weighting across all five. Whoever will manage the day-to-day relationship needs to be in the scoring room. A process run entirely by procurement and legal will optimize for contract terms and miss whether anyone can actually do the work.

A two-stage structure beats a single round almost every time. Use an initial written submission to get to a shortlist of three, then bring the finalists in for a live working session rather than a second polished presentation. Give them a real, current problem from your business and a short window, a couple of days, to respond. What you learn from watching a team think under real constraints isn't comparable to what you learn from a rehearsed deck.

What This Buys You

Chemistry is a legitimate factor, and it's fine to weight it explicitly rather than pretending the decision is purely rational. A multi-year agency relationship run on pure transaction terms is a bad way to spend several years. The mistake is letting chemistry substitute for evaluating the actual work, rather than sitting alongside it as one input among several.

The organizations that get this right spend more time building the brief and the evaluation framework than they spend running the process itself, which feels backwards until you've seen what it prevents. A brief that's been argued over internally until it's honest, criteria fixed before anyone saw a response, and a scoring panel with real stakes in the outcome will get you an agency that understands exactly what it signed up for. That matters more than it sounds like it should. An agency that wins on a sharp, honest brief and then underdelivers has no excuses left. An agency that wins on a vague one always has somewhere to point.