What Most RFPs Get Wrong
The RFP process is supposed to help you choose the best agency. More often it is engineered to select the best proposal-writer instead. We decline more RFPs than we answer — here is why.
An agency RFP is meant to help you pick the right agency in a fair, objective way. In practice, most RFPs do the opposite. They reward the agency that is best at answering RFPs. That is a completely different skill from doing the work. Many strong firms decline more RFPs than they answer. Not out of arrogance. The format itself often makes a bad choice likely.
If you run RFPs, this is meant to make yours better, not to talk you out of them. Used well, a procurement process protects you from charm. It forces a fair comparison. Used the way most are, it quietly screens out the very firms you hoped to find.
The uncomfortable truth
A typical RFP rewards the wrong things. It asks for free strategic work before any relationship exists. It scores polished documents over real thinking. It hides the true budget and the decision-makers. And it values process compliance over fit. The agencies that win these have dedicated proposal teams and a library of reused answers. That proves they are good at winning RFPs. It says nothing about whether they are good for you. The best agencies are often too busy doing great work to run a proposal factory.
The specific things RFPs get wrong
The same mistakes show up again and again:
Asking for free ideas - requesting spec strategy or creative up front, which the best firms refuse to give and the desperate ones over-give.
Hiding the budget - forcing agencies to guess, which makes every proposal a fiction and every comparison meaningless.
Over-weighting the document - scoring formatting and completeness over the quality of thought, rewarding writers over thinkers.
No real conversation - eliminating the back-and-forth where fit is actually discovered, in favor of one-way submissions.
Keeping decision-makers offstage - so the agency never meets the people whose problem it is supposed to solve.
Inviting too many bidders - when a dozen agencies are competing, the best ones opt out, and you are left choosing among the firms with nothing better to do than fill out forms.
Why this matters for you
Run an RFP this way and you don't filter for the best agency. You filter for the best RFP responder. Then you act surprised when great-on-paper turns into mediocre-in-practice. What really predicts a good engagement is chemistry, candor, and a shared grasp of the real problem. A paper process cannot capture any of that, no matter how strict the scoring rubric looks. You optimized the procurement and hurt the outcome. That gap is where most disappointing agency relationships begin.
How good agencies actually operate
Good agencies respond to RFPs run by people who understand this. The signs are clear: a real budget range, access to decision-makers, an invitation to talk rather than just submit, and no demand for free strategic work. When an RFP fails those tests, a good firm declines and explains why. The format is doing the buyer a disservice they often cannot see from the inside. When a prospect is open to it, a better path is a paid discovery sprint or a working session. Both sides learn far more in an afternoon than a fifty-page response could ever reveal. A real conversation earns a client. The best-formatted PDF predicts nothing about the work.
The honest take
Most RFPs get the most important thing wrong. They measure the proposal instead of the partnership. Want the best agency, not the best proposal-writer? Then share your real budget. Put your decision-makers in the room. Refuse to extract free strategy. And replace the paperwork with a conversation. The agencies worth hiring will respond to that. The ones who only show up for the document marathon are telling you what they are actually good at. It is not the work.
Sources
TTGC - our own agency philosophy and procurement principles.
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