I’ll research current data on RFPs, agency selection, and project outcomes before writing.I have strong data. Let me do one more search on how good agencies decide whether to respond to RFPs (bid/no-bid behaviour) to sharpen the core argument.I have everything I need. Here’s the article.
The agencies you most want to hire are the ones quietly deleting your email
Somewhere right now, a marketing director is congratulating themselves on a thorough RFP. Twelve pages. Detailed requirements matrix. A scoring rubric weighted across nine criteria. Sent to ten agencies to “keep the field competitive.” It feels rigorous. It feels safe.
It is quietly doing the opposite of what they think.
The best agencies, the ones with a real point of view and a waiting list, read that document and decline. Not because they can’t do the work. Because the document itself tells them everything they need to know about what working with you would feel like, and the math doesn’t favour them. One agency owner who writes openly about this estimated that they turn down roughly nine out of ten RFPs they receive, and noted with some regret that many of those projects looked genuinely rewarding. The ones they pass on aren’t the bad fits. Some are the best fits, killed by the format.
So your shortlist quietly self-selects toward agencies that are good at responding to RFPs rather than good at building websites. Those are not the same skill. Let me show you the mechanism, because once you see it you cannot unsee it.
What a fat RFP actually signals to a good agency
An RFP is a first date where one party shows up with a contract and a list of demands. The agency reads it not just for the project, but for what it reveals about you as a future client. Strong agencies have learned to read these signals fast, and most of the signals are bad.
Start with the field size. The agencies you want operate on a simple rule of thumb that gets stated again and again across the industry: if more than four or five firms received the same invitation, decline. One practitioner described being told a client had sent a single brief to eighteen event agencies. That isn’t a competition, it’s a lottery, and serious firms don’t buy lottery tickets with forty hours of senior time. The blunt version one agency owner offered: it’s nothing personal, it’s mostly math. Being one of five gives a firm a far better chance than being one of twenty.
Then there’s the suspicion that the whole thing is theatre. Procurement professionals themselves admit this is common. RFPs are increasingly issued late in the buying cycle, sometimes after a vendor has effectively been chosen, used to justify a decision already made rather than to evaluate options honestly. Good agencies know this game. They can smell an incumbent being re-papered from the wording of the requirements. When the questions seem tailored to a competitor’s strengths, experienced firms read it as a rigged process and walk. The data backs the instinct: one analysis of 1,200 declined RFPs found that in 73% of cases the eventual winner had already been named in the buyer’s early project discussions.
And then the document itself does the rest of the work. Suppliers consistently cite a recognisable cluster of reasons for choosing not to bid: ambiguous briefs, solicitations overloaded with low-value requirements, specifications that swing between far too generic and weirdly hyper-specific, and response windows so short they signal disorganisation. Every one of those is a self-inflicted wound. You wrote the thing that scared off the people you wanted.
The quiet rich get richer problem
Here’s the part that should genuinely bother you. Responding to a full RFP is expensive, and the cost falls unevenly. Large agencies absorb it because they keep dedicated proposal teams. One former big-agency employee described having a team of roughly ten people whose entire job was responding to RFPs. The nimble, specialist firm with deep expertise in exactly your sector does not have that. There, the founder and one or two staff write your proposal after hours and at weekends, time stolen from current client work.
So your RFP format quietly taxes the small expert and subsidises the big generalist. The firms that can afford a polished response are frequently the ones least likely to give your project senior attention once you’ve signed. You are optimising for proposal-writing capacity and calling it diligence.
The proposal is a guess, and you’re scoring the guesses
Set aside who responds for a moment. Consider what you actually receive. You get a stack of documents in which every agency has guessed at your problem, then priced their guess.
They have to guess, because they don’t know your business yet. As one agency writer put it plainly, when a firm responds cold they can only tell you they’ll do A, B and C for your budget and leave out X, Y and Z, and because they know nothing about your business, the proposal is fundamentally a guess. A short conversation would let you decide priorities together. The RFP format forbids that conversation precisely when you most need it.
This produces two failure modes, and both hurt you. The honest agency scopes conservatively and looks expensive next to the firm that promised everything. The optimistic agency promises everything for less, wins, and then the relationship sours as reality lands. The writer’s warning is worth sitting with: the firm that says yes to everything cheaply will eventually become resentful, and you will become disillusioned.</
You are then asked to rank these guesses on a scorecard. The scoring doesn’t fix the problem, it launders it. Research summarised by Responsive notes that the average RFP is scored by four to five evaluators, and that each additional evaluator widens the consensus gap and lengthens the process. A spread of evaluators with wildly different technical literacy is rating documents that were guesses to begin with. Precise-looking output, garbage input.
Where the real damage shows up: the project itself
None of this would matter much if RFP-selected projects went well. They don’t, and the reason traces directly back to the vagueness the RFP both contains and rewards.
Look at how websites and software projects actually fail. The Standish Group’s long-running CHAOS research found that only 29% of projects finish on time and on budget, meaning roughly seven in ten overshoot their timeline, their budget, or both. And the cause sits right where the RFP is weakest. PMI data shows that unclear requirements account for 39% of project failures, and separately that 37% of failures stem from a lack of clearly defined objectives and milestones. Vague objectives are the single biggest killer of projects, and the RFP is a vague-objectives delivery mechanism.
Then scope creep moves in. Industry analysis citing IEEE research found that more than half of software projects now experience scope creep, up from 43% to 52% over a seven-year stretch, and that this creep can drive costs to as much as four times the original estimate. The mechanism is exactly what you’d expect: when a brief says “build a website” rather than specifying the actual pages, the CMS, the integrations and the responsive behaviour, every later request feels reasonable to you because nothing ever said it was out of scope. Vague scope is an open invitation. PMI ranks scope creep as the third leading cause of project failure overall, and unlike the top two causes it is almost entirely preventable.
So the document that filters out your best agencies also fails to define the thing you’re buying, which then guarantees the overrun. Across our projects, we’ve found that most failures don’t begin during the build. They’re baked in before anyone writes code, in the gap between what the RFP said and what the business actually needed.
What to do instead: get to clarity before you ask anyone to commit
The fix is not “abandon all process and pick your mate’s cousin’s agency.” It’s to reorder the steps. Stop asking strangers to guess at your problem and price the guess. Start by producing clarity, then bring vendors into a conversation rather than a contest.
This is the heart of the blueprint-first approach we use at NexusBond, and it inverts the traditional sequence. Instead of writing requirements you’re not sure about, sending them to ten firms, and choosing between competing guesses, you run structured discovery first to produce validated requirements, realistic scope, and aligned stakeholders. Only then do you talk to a short, deliberately chosen list of agencies, and the conversation is about how they’d solve a problem you both now understand the same way.
Concretely, here is what to change this week.
- Cut your list to three, maybe four firms, chosen on evidence. Use referrals, their published thinking, and their track record in your sector. A shortlist built from research and a few exploratory calls saves enormous time and money, and it tells good agencies you’re serious rather than running a cattle market.
- Replace the document drop with conversations. Give each shortlisted firm a real exchange about your business, your constraints and your priorities before anyone writes a proposal. You’ll learn more about whether they “get” your business in thirty minutes of dialogue than in thirty pages of polished response.
- Define outcomes, not implementation. Even DesignRush’s own RFP guidance concedes the point: rather than dictating a detailed implementation plan, describe the desired outcomes and let firms propose how to get there. Better still, do the requirements work yourself first so the outcomes are validated, not assumed.
- Be honest about the field. If you genuinely have an incumbent you intend to keep, don’t run a fake competition to satisfy procurement. You burn goodwill with every firm that does the work, and word travels.
- Pin the scope down before budget is committed. List the actual pages, the CMS, the integrations, the responsive requirements. The specificity you put in up front is the specificity that protects you from the four-times cost overrun later.
The traditional RFP feels like control because it produces paperwork. Real control is knowing exactly what you’re buying, having the firms who’d be best at it actually want the work, and having a scope solid enough that nobody can quietly inflate it once the deposit clears.
Your goal is not to collect the most proposals. It is to start the right project with the right partner, and the fat RFP works against both. Spend the effort on clarity before commitment, and the agencies you actually want will stop deleting your email.
Ready to get started?
