Eleven RFP responses received. Scored against a weighted matrix. Three agencies on the pitch stage. The build that followed will run into the mid six figures. The selection consulting was a rounding error against it. The job was to make sure the right agency was chosen for the right reasons, and to make sure every
From around 182 enquiries YTD to 529 across 18 months of phased, focused work. No rebuild. No rebrand. No six figure project. Online enquiries nearly tripled The starting point A site that looked fine on the surface. Search rankings were strong. Organic traffic accounted for around two thirds of all sessions. The agency’s quarterly report
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
A six month discovery that turned “we need a new website” into a 41 question RFP, five personas, fifteen user journeys, a CMS recommendation and a shortlist of agencies ready to be briefed. A downstream build that would otherwise have been priced blind, scoped late and changed three times after kick off. The starting point