Agency RFPS: No "Cattle Calls"

So you need to engage a marketing agency-be it for creative, digital, public relations, media, whatever. While it's a necessary part of the brand-growth process, if you go about the wrong way you will needlessly consume time, money and energy.

For starters, don't kick off the whole RFP exercise until you are absolutely committed to the product/service offering you need to promote and are ready to hire. Things change over time, not least of which budgets.

Once you're ready to go, one of the most common ways to start off on the wrong foot is to issue RFP's to a long list of possible contenders-the corporate equivalent of a cattle call on the vast prairie. With this approach, you stand a good chance of alienating some talented agencies, which might perceive the "wide net" outreach as a waste of their valuable time.

It's far better and more effective to settle on a reasonable short-list. Once that's been accomplished and you've met with the agencies, decide they are a viable fit and the chemistry is good, then it's RFP time. Make it short and savvy. Brief the agency and give them enough information to properly respond. Include the situation and reason for the pitch, agency expectations, criteria set and how and why a decision will be made. A large percentage of client/agency relationships fail because marketers don't explicitly communicate the scope of work involved at the outset. State your expectations clearly and concisely.

So far, so good. But what if you don't know where to even begin to look for outside expertise? This is quite often the reason why some companies resort to cattle calls, and it's an area where Smarti Solutions can help. Sure, you can spend hours poking around LinkedIn, hoping to line up some potential resources that can actually do what they claim to do. But we've already done that-for many, many years. We not only know where to look, we know who we're looking for.

So don't bother reinventing the wheel. The most efficient RFP process for marketing services already exists. Besides, you've got more important things on your plate. By keeping the list of potential marketing partners within reason, you'll get more enthusiastic responses and can spend more time collecting their insights, evaluating them and ultimately forming a working relationship that will achieve your business goals.