A strong website RFP should define the business problem, not prescribe every answer.
I have read website Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that specify the CMS, sitemap, number of templates, integrations, design rounds, development requirements and launch date down to the smallest detail. Sometimes they are 20 or 30 pages long.
Yet after reading them, the most important question is still unanswered: What is the business actually trying to change?
This is where many website RFPs go wrong. In an effort to make the project easier to scope and proposals easier to compare, organizations define so much of the solution in advance that they leave very little room for an agency to think strategically.
At that point, the agency is no longer being asked to help solve a problem. It is being asked to price someone else’s proposed solution.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that if execution is all you need. But if you are looking for a creative agency that can challenge assumptions, uncover opportunities and help determine what the website should become, the RFP needs to create room for that kind of thinking.
One of the most revealing questions in an RFP may be the simplest: What would you challenge about what we have asked for?
Most RFPs ask agencies to explain how they will fulfill the requirements. Far fewer ask what may be missing, which assumptions deserve validation or what the agency would change before work begins.
Ask which parts of the proposed scope they would revisit during discovery.
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