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.
The RFP exists to help you pick the right agency objectively and fairly. In practice, most RFPs we receive do the opposite — they select for the agency that is best at responding to RFPs, which is a completely different skill from doing the work. We decline more RFPs than we answer, not out of arrogance, but because the format itself often guarantees you will choose badly.
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 and forces a fair comparison. Used the way most are, it quietly screens out the exact firms you were hoping to find.
The uncomfortable truth
A typical RFP rewards exactly the wrong things. It demands free strategic work before any relationship exists, scores polished documents over genuine thinking, hides the real budget and decision-makers, and prioritizes process compliance over fit. The agencies that win these are the ones with dedicated proposal teams and a library of reusable answers — which tells you they are good at winning RFPs, and nothing about whether they will be good for you. The best agencies are often too busy doing excellent work to staff a proposal factory.
The specific things RFPs get wrong
The same mistakes appear 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
When you run an RFP this way, you are not filtering for the best agency — you are filtering for the best RFP responder, and then acting surprised when great-on-paper turns into mediocre-in-practice. The thing that actually predicts a successful engagement — chemistry, candor, and a shared understanding of the real problem — is precisely the thing a paper process cannot capture, no matter how rigorous the scoring rubric looks. You optimized the procurement and de-optimized the outcome, and the gap between the two is exactly where most disappointing agency relationships are born.
How we actually operate
We respond to RFPs that show signs of being run by people who understand this — 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, we decline and tell the issuer why, because the format is doing them a disservice they often cannot see from the inside. When a prospect is willing, we propose replacing the document marathon with a paid discovery sprint or a working session, where both sides learn far more in an afternoon than a fifty-page response could ever reveal. We would rather earn a client through a real conversation than win one through the best-formatted PDF, because the 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. If you want the best agency rather than the best proposal-writer, 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 — and it is not the work.
Sources
TTGC — our own agency philosophy and procurement principles.
