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 Process That Selects for the Wrong Things
The standard agency RFP process is essentially a writing competition. Agencies spend weeks crafting a response designed to impress a committee of people who probably don't agree on what they're looking for in the first place. The prettiest deck wins. Or the most familiar name. Or the one whose account director had the best lunch.
That's not entirely cynical. Procurement teams are busy, evaluation criteria are often vague, and the people scoring responses are usually looking for a reason to feel confident rather than a method to measure fit. The result is a process that's thorough in appearance and fairly random in outcome.
If you've ever awarded a major agency contract and had buyer's remorse within six months, the problem started in the RFP.
Where Most Briefs Fall Apart
The brief is where the process lives or dies. Most briefs are too long, too vague, or both. They describe the business at length without saying what problem needs solving. They list objectives that could apply to any brand ("drive awareness, grow consideration, convert customers"). They ask for case studies that demonstrate broad capability when what they should be asking for is specific evidence of work in comparable situations.
The agencies reading a poor brief will fill the gaps with whatever makes them look strongest. You're not learning about them, you're learning about how they pitch.
A good brief is honest about the actual challenge. It names the tension in the business. It tells prospective agencies what success looks like in concrete, measurable terms. It sets scope clearly enough that you can compare responses apples-to-apples. And it is short enough that an agency principal actually reads it rather than delegating it to the team who'll write the response.
Fix the Evaluation Before You Send the Brief
Most organizations design the RFP and then figure out how to score it. It should be the other way around. Before the brief goes out, the selection committee needs to agree on what they're actually buying: capability, chemistry, capacity, price, or some specific combination. Those priorities need to be weighted. And the people scoring need to be the people who will manage the relationship, not just procurement and legal.
Two-stage processes work better than one. An initial submission to shortlist, followed by a live working session with the finalists, tells you far more than two rounds of paper. The working session isn't a presentation. It's a task, give them a real problem from your business, with two days to respond. Watch how they think, who shows up, and whether the work is actually good.
Chemistry matters and it's fine to say so. A five-year agency relationship that's purely transactional is a miserable way to work. You're allowed to factor in whether you'd want to be in a room with these people for extended periods. Just don't let it substitute for evaluating the work.
What Good Looks Like
A well-run RFP takes longer to design than it does to execute. The brief gets reviewed internally until it's honest. The evaluation criteria are fixed before the process starts. The scoring is done by the people with skin in the game. And the winning agency understands exactly what they're walking into, not a cleaned-up version of it.
That last point matters more than most procurement guides admit. An agency that wins a properly structured RFP and then delivers badly has no excuses. An agency that wins a vague brief and then underdelivers can always point to the gaps. Give them no gaps.