Most marketing leads I meet treat the RFP as a final step. Discovery is done. Now we send it out and pick an agency.
I’d argue the opposite. The RFP is the centrepiece of the discovery. It’s the document that proves you know what you want. Everything that came before it (the audit, the personas, the journeys, the CMS evaluation) feeds into the RFP. Everything that comes after it (the pitches, the selection, the contract) is a function of how well the RFP was written.
A good RFP changes who responds. A great RFP changes how they respond.
What goes in a good RFP
Forty to fifty questions, organised by section. Company, account management, communications, technical, SEO, accessibility, security, costs, timeline. Each question has a hard word limit. Most are between 250 and 500 words. The hardest questions are longer, because the hardest questions are the ones that separate the agencies from the agencies who can do the work.
Specific questions, not generic ones. Don’t ask “describe your project management approach.” Ask “describe how you would manage our internal team and their external suppliers to ensure the deadlines are met, with examples from past projects of similar scale.” The first is a sales question. The second is a delivery question. The answers will be different.
An appendix that carries the firm’s own discovery work. Personas. User journeys. Content matrix. Site map. Measurement framework. The competitor audit, if you’re willing to share it. The agencies who respond well to the appendix tend to be the agencies who’ll deliver well. The agencies who ignore it tend to be the agencies who’d want to redo discovery on your budget.
A confidentiality clause that has teeth. The agencies you’ll be working with talk to each other. The market is small. An NDA that requires written confirmation of deletion when an agency withdraws is the bare minimum.
A timeline with hard dates. Not “Q3 2025.” Not “summer.” Specific weeks. Specific deliverables. The agencies who push back on the timeline before they’ve quoted are telling you something. So are the ones who agree without asking a question.
A cost structure that breaks the price apart. Licence. Hosting. Build. Maintenance. Training. Documentation. Travel. The agencies who lump these together are hoping you won’t look. The agencies who break them out are confident in their numbers.
What a good RFP filters for
Agencies who read the brief. Sounds obvious. Isn’t. A surprising number of agency responses come back referencing a different firm, a different sector or a generic capabilities pitch.
Agencies who can answer specific questions in fewer words than the limit. Verbosity is usually a sign of weakness on the question. The agencies who pack 500 word answers into 200 are the ones who know the answer.
Agencies who push back on the parts of the brief that don’t make sense. Not on the bits they don’t like. The bits that don’t make sense. A good agency will identify the contradictions in your own brief and ask about them in their response. That’s the agency you want building your site.
Agencies who can demonstrate the work, not just describe it. Three case studies of similar scale, with named clients, named outcomes and named limitations. The agencies who say “we can’t share that under NDA” universally are the agencies whose case studies don’t exist in the form they’re describing.
What it doesn’t filter for
The cheapest price. The newest CMS. The flashiest pitch deck. The agency who flew their MD up for the introductory call. None of those correlate with delivery.
What does correlate with delivery: a clear, well written RFP response. An honest answer on the timeline. A named project manager who’d be on the project from week one. References you can pick up the phone to.
The RFP is the work because the document that brought the responses in determines the quality of the agency you’ll end up working with. If the RFP is thin, the responses will be thin. If the RFP is sharp, the responses will be too.