You've decided to run a formal process. You're going to do this right. You draft a document outlining your objectives, your budget range, your timeline, and what you're looking for. You send it to five agencies. You wait.
The responses come back. They're long, well-formatted, and almost impossible to compare. One agency sent a 40-page deck. Another sent a tight six-page proposal. A third responded with a series of clarifying questions before submitting anything. The fourth included three case studies that look relevant but you can't tell if they actually are. The fifth gave you a price that's half of everyone else's with no explanation of why.
Now what?
If this feels familiar, the problem didn't start when the responses arrived. It started with the RFP itself.
What an RFP is actually supposed to do
Most people treat an RFP as a request for information. Send it out, collect responses, compare what comes back.
That's not what an RFP is for. An RFP is a filter. Its job is to eliminate agencies that can't meet your requirements, surface the two or three that can, and give you enough structured information to score them against consistent criteria. If your RFP isn't doing those three things, it's generating work without generating clarity.
The reason most RFPs fail is that they're written to be comprehensive rather than specific. They cover everything the company thinks an agency should know, ask every question someone in the room wanted answered, and end up as a document that rewards agencies good at writing proposals rather than agencies good at solving the actual problem.
A 40-page RFP response tells you one thing with certainty: that agency has a strong proposal team. It tells you almost nothing about whether they can execute.
The four things your RFP actually needs
A well-structured RFP is shorter than most people expect and more specific than most people write.
The first thing it needs is a precise problem statement, not a broad objective. "Increase brand awareness" is an objective. "We are entering two new regional markets in Q3 and need paid media support to drive qualified leads for a sales team of eight, targeting mid-market operations buyers" is a problem statement. Agencies respond very differently to those two prompts. The second one tells you immediately which agencies read it carefully and which ones sent a templated response.
The second thing it needs is explicit evaluation criteria, stated in the document. Most companies keep their scoring criteria internal, which means agencies can't prioritize what matters to you and you can't compare responses against a consistent standard. Telling agencies upfront that you'll be evaluating on execution track record, team structure, cost transparency, and governance approach does two things. It filters out agencies that are weak on those dimensions — they'll either decline or self-select out — and it gives you a framework to score every response the same way.
The third thing it needs is a required response format. If you don't specify the format, you'll receive responses in five completely different structures and spend hours trying to normalize them before you can compare anything. Tell agencies exactly what sections you want, in what order, and what length. A well-run RFP response should be eight to twelve pages maximum. If an agency can't make their case in that space, that's useful information about how they communicate.
The fourth thing it needs is a realistic timeline with a defined decision date. Agencies allocate resources to RFP responses. A vague timeline signals an unserious process and gets you lower-quality responses from senior people who deprioritized it. A specific decision date signals that this is a real engagement with a real buyer who is actually going to choose someone.
The question most RFPs forget to ask
After all the standard questions about capabilities, case studies, team bios, and pricing, most RFPs omit the question that tells you the most about an agency: what will you need from us to make this engagement successful?
Agencies that answer this question well are telling you they've thought carefully about the working relationship, not just the pitch. They understand that engagements fail as often because of client-side gaps as agency-side ones. They've done this enough times to know where the friction usually comes from.
Agencies that give you a vague or reassuring answer — "we just need access and alignment" — are either inexperienced or telling you what they think you want to hear. Neither is a good sign.
The answer to this question also gives you a preview of what the actual engagement will feel like. An agency that asks for a dedicated internal point of contact, a 48-hour turnaround on feedback, and executive availability for quarterly reviews is telling you something concrete about how they work. You can decide whether that matches your reality before you sign anything.
When to use an RFP and when not to
A formal RFP process makes sense when the contract value is high enough to justify the time investment, when you have more than two or three credible candidates, and when internal stakeholders need a visible, structured process to align around a recommendation.
It doesn't make sense for every agency search. If you're replacing a single-service vendor on a short timeline, a structured briefing and a few direct conversations will get you further faster than a formal document process. An RFP is a tool, not a ritual. Using it when it's not warranted slows down decisions that should be straightforward and signals to good agencies that your procurement process may be more burden than the engagement is worth.
The test is simple. If you have a complex, high-stakes decision with multiple credible candidates and stakeholders who need to align around a recommendation, run an RFP. If you have a clear frontrunner and a tight timeline, skip it and run a structured evaluation instead.
What good looks like on the other side
A well-run RFP produces three things before you've spoken to a single agency in person. It produces a shortlist of two or three agencies that actually fit your requirements, because the specificity of the brief filtered out everyone who didn't. It produces comparable responses, because you told everyone what format to use and what to address. And it produces a preliminary score, because your evaluation criteria were defined before the responses arrived.
By the time you sit down for presentations, you're not starting from scratch. You're pressure-testing a preliminary ranking and looking for the red flags that don't show up in a written response. That's a fundamentally different conversation than walking into a pitch with no framework and hoping one agency impresses you enough to justify the choice.
Structure doesn't slow down the process. It removes the part of the process that wastes the most time: trying to compare things that were never designed to be compared.
Where to start
If you're heading into an agency search and need a structured way to evaluate what comes back, the free Agency Comparison Scorecard gives you a side-by-side framework that works whether you ran a formal RFP or not.
When you're ready to move from shortlist to final recommendation — with weighted scoring, documented trade-offs, and a stakeholder-ready Decision Memo — the full Evaluation Pack has everything you need.
— The Clarity Brief