The firm is large and well known. The UK had grown organically for years on the same Drupal platform. The home page scored 26 out of 100 on PageSpeed. Most of the content was indexed but unread. The agency relationship had drifted into reporting cycles that flattered the numbers without telling anyone whether the site
Three agencies in the building. Three pitch slots of forty five minutes each, with fifteen minutes of questions. Eight hours from arrival to handshakes. By the end of the day, the partners will have decided who’s getting the contract. The most common way to waste this day is to let the agencies pitch their RFP
The agency wants to start the rebuild. The marketing lead wants to start the rebuild. The partners want to start the rebuild. Six months later, the project is over budget, three months late and not doing what the partners thought it would do. This is what happens when “we need a new website” is treated
The build slips. The agency comes back to renegotiate scope. The marketing lead looks at the contract and finds a four page statement of work that says “deliver a website.” This is a problem. The fix is to make sure it doesn’t happen. The agency wrote thirty pages. Use them. In the RFP response, the
Every time I run a CMS evaluation for a law firm, the same thing happens. The IT team has a preference. The agency has a preference. The marketing team has a preference. The partners don’t have a preference because they don’t know what a CMS is, but they’ve been told the new one will be
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,
I’ve now run persona and user journey work for several law firms. The answer to “what do users do on the site?” comes back the same every time, in roughly the same order. See what services the firm offers. See what sectors the firm works in. Read the biography of the lawyer they’re going to
You send the RFP to a longlist of agencies on a Thursday. You spend three weeks doing other work. Eleven responses arrive in your inbox at the deadline. Then you have eight working days to read all of them and tell your partners which three you want to put on a pitch stage. If you