The agency selection process usually ends the same way: some sort of sign-off final meeting, a gut check, then a decision. The contract gets signed and work begins.
What almost never happens is documentation with
No paper trails, no record of what criteria mattered, not to mention what trade-offs were accepted, what risks were flagged and why you proceeded. Just a decision that lives in someone's memory — or worse, in a chain of Slack messages nobody can find.
This works fine until it doesn't.
When the decision gets questioned
Most agency decisions look reasonable at the time. The problems surface later, when results plateau, budgets come under pressure, or a new executive joins and asks a simple question: why did we go with them?
At that point, if your answer is "they seemed like the best fit" or "we felt confident in their team," you're in a difficult position. Not because the decision was wrong — it may have been entirely right — but because you can't demonstrate that it was made thoughtfully.
This is the moment when undocumented decisions become expensive. They invite second-guessing, slow down renewal conversations, and put the person who made the call in a defensive position they didn't need to be in.
Documentation doesn't change the decision. It protects it.
What documentation actually needs to include
Most people, when they think about documenting a vendor decision, imagine a lengthy report nobody reads. That's not what this is.
An effective vendor decision document is a single page. It answers four questions clearly and nothing else:
What decision was made, and why now? This is context — a sentence or two about what business problem triggered the search and what the evaluation objective was.
What is the recommendation and what is the rationale? Not a paragraph. Three bullets maximum. If you need more than three to justify the choice, the decision isn't clear enough yet.
What trade-offs were accepted? Every vendor selection involves trade-offs. Vendor A was cheaper but had weaker reporting. Vendor B had better integrations but required more internal resources at launch. Writing these down explicitly shows that you considered them — and chose to proceed anyway, with eyes open.
What are the next steps? Immediate actions, dependencies, and a review checkpoint. This turns the memo from a historical document into a living decision artifact.
That's it. One page. Declarative language. No marketing speak. No attachments required to understand it.
Why the memo matters more than the spreadsheet
If you're running a structured evaluation — scoring vendors across weighted criteria, reviewing risk flags, comparing cost and capability — all of that work lives in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is useful. It forces rigor, surfaces trade-offs, and keeps the evaluation honest.
But nobody aligns around a spreadsheet. Stakeholders don't read tabs. Leadership doesn't approve rows.
The memo is the decision artifact. The spreadsheet informs it. The memo decides.
When you can summarize the entire evaluation in one page — recommendation, rationale, risks, next steps — you've done the work correctly. If you can't, the evaluation probably wasn't disciplined enough.
Who actually needs this
If you're a founder making a quick, low-stakes vendor call, this level of documentation is probably more than you need. Move fast.
But if you're a Marketing Director, VP of Operations, or Chief of Staff at a company with more than 50 people — someone who has to bring a recommendation to leadership, align stakeholders who didn't sit through every proposal, or justify a $5,000–$50,000 annual agency contract — documentation isn't bureaucracy. It's protection.
It protects the decision from second-guessing. It protects you from having to reconstruct your reasoning months later. And it protects the agency relationship by establishing clear expectations and rationale from day one.
Where to start
Before you can write the memo, you need the evaluation. That means scoring vendors against consistent criteria, surfacing risk, and making trade-offs explicit before opinions harden.
The free Agency Comparison Scorecard is a good first step — it gives you a structured way to compare up to five vendors side by side and narrow your shortlist quickly.
Once you're down to your top two or three, that's when the real work begins: weighted scoring, risk flags, and a stakeholder-ready recommendation your leadership can actually act on.
When you’re ready for the full evaluation, get the full Agency Selection Scorecard + Evaluation Pack
— The Clarity Brief