If your RFP reads like a procurement document, you'll get procurement-quality work. If you want work that changes culture and builds brands that matter, write briefs that honor the craft of persuasion.
1. The SMIT: What Are You Actually Trying to Do?
Get brutally honest about your Single Most Important Thing. Not your boss's SMIT. Yours.
Are you trying to sell product? Change minds? Build cultural relevance? Make people feel something new about your category?
Most can't answer without hedging: "We want awareness while building consideration and converting customers and establishing thought leadership and maybe earned media."
That's wishful thinking, not strategy.
Pick one thing. Make it specific enough that everyone - including agencies - can tell you how they'd measure success. Everything else serves that one thing.
2. Practice Half Life: Cut Everything in Half
RFPs are invitations to solve a problem. Cut your draft in half. Then cut that in half. Keep going until reading your RFP feels like discovering something interesting rather than completing homework.
This doesn't mean shorter RFPs - it means concision. A ten-page RFP with every sentence earning its place beats a three-page document full of vague generalities. Every sentence should either clarify the problem or provide context that changes how an agency might solve it. If it doesn't do one of those things, delete it. If someone reads your RFP and immediately understands what success looks like, what failure looks like, and what thinking might bridge the gap, you're getting somewhere.
3. Agencies Are Not Vendors
If your problems were simple, you wouldn't need an agency partner. The fact that you're writing an RFP means you need people who can see what you can't and create work better than what you could do alone. Write to their intelligence, not their compliance department.
Instead of requiring category experience, ask how they'd approach your challenge differently. Instead of limiting page counts, give them freedom to communicate however they think best.
4. The Budget Conversation You're Avoiding
Clients treat budgets like state secrets. Agencies pretend they can create miracles with pocket change. Everyone lies, and work suffers. Budget transparency helps agencies calibrate responses and forces you to think clearly about the relationship between investment and expected results.
5. AI Won't Write Your Strategy
AI helps organize thoughts and check typos. It cannot understand your market position, decode company politics, or predict what creative approach will resonate with your customers. Use AI for editing, not thinking. For clarity, not insight. For structuring information you have, not generating insights you don't.
6. Tell the Truth About How You Work
Be honest about organizational reality. Complicated approval process? Say so. CEO with strong creative opinions? Mention it. Legal reviews everything twice? Factor that into timelines.
This isn't admitting dysfunction - it's helping agencies understand their working environment so they can propose approaches that fit your culture. Good agencies want to do great work within your constraints, not despite them. But they need to know what those constraints are.
7. Build Internal Alignment First
Before sending your RFP, get clear answers:
- Who actually makes the final decision? Not who's involved, but who has veto power.
- What does success look like to each stakeholder? Your CFO cares about different things than your brand manager. Surface those differences.
- What is non-negotiable? Identify explicitly rather than letting agencies discover through trial and error.
- What are you optimizing for? Speed? Cost? Innovation? Risk abatement? You can't optimize everything.
Agencies shouldn't navigate organizational dysfunction while solving business problems.
8. Structure for Clarity, Not Coverage
Organize your RFP so agencies focus on solving problems instead of decoding intentions:
- What We're Trying to Accomplish (one paragraph: your SMIT and why it matters now)
- What We Know (market context, competitive situation, customer insights)
- What We Need (specific problem to solve, not tactics you think might solve it)
- How We'll Work Together (decision process, timeline, budget, success metrics)
- How We'll Choose (evaluation criteria and what matters most)
Five sections. Each focused on information that directly impacts how agencies approach your challenge.
9. Evaluation Criteria That Actually Matter
Most important question: which agency understands your challenge best and has the most compelling solution approach?
Yes, you need to know if they can be executed. Yes, you need to understand the process and the team. Yes, economics must work. But lead with thinking. If an agency doesn't understand your problem or can't articulate a differentiated approach, nothing else matters.
10. The Partnership Mindset
You're not looking for the agency that jumps highest or follows instructions best. You want the agency whose thinking complements yours, whose strengths fill your gaps, whose problem-solving aligns with how you want to show up.
Be specific about expectations, transparent about constraints, clear about ambitions. The right agencies will recognize themselves in your brief. The wrong ones will move on. Everyone wins.
Great creative partnerships don't start when you sign contracts. They start when you write the brief that helps the right agencies see your problem the same way - and imagine solutions you never could have reached alone.
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