A good agency brief fits on a page or two. It covers:
- what your business is
- what isn’t working
- what result would make the work worth it
- what a customer is worth to you
- what budget you can commit
- who decides
- how you’ll judge the proposals
Send the same brief and the same questions to about three agencies, ask them all to answer in the same format, and compare what comes back on the same terms.
This is the brief, or marketing RFP, an owner or marketing leader sends to a handful of agencies to get proposals. It isn’t a creative brief, the shorter document a marketer writes to brief a designer or copywriter on one campaign. Those matter too, but they come later.
I’ve answered agency briefs at my own agency for years. A vague brief invites a vague proposal, and when each agency has to guess at different things, what comes back can’t be compared.
A brief or an RFP?
In my experience, a short, specific brief gets you better proposals than a forty-page RFP. An RFP that asks for free strategy and hides the budget gives the strongest agencies a reason to pass, and a long one tends to favor the agencies with the most sales capacity, not the ones best suited to the work.
A formal RFP makes sense when procurement requires one, when the spend is large or when you’re coordinating several vendors at once. Even then, keep it short, pay for any real strategy work you ask for, and tell the agencies how you’ll score them.
And if you already have an agency, it’s worth sending them this brief before you start a search. Sometimes the problem was the brief.
Start with your own numbers
Before you write a word to an agency, work out the numbers only you know. An agency can help you hit a target, but the target should come out of your own economics. You know what a customer is worth better than they do.
The most useful number to bring is how much you could spend to win one new customer. Start with what a customer is worth to you, then subtract what it costs to deliver the work, the overhead it has to carry, the profit you need to keep and the cost of selling. What’s left is the most you’d want to spend on marketing to win that customer. If you know what share of qualified leads become customers, you can turn that into a target cost per qualified lead, and for lead-generation work that’s a number an agency can actually work against, as long as you agree on what counts as qualified. It’s also worth knowing how long it takes to earn that money back. The full calculation, with a calculator, is in how much you can afford to spend to win a customer. The same idea in under two minutes:
Then decide what budget you can commit, and for how long. A brief with a real budget range gets proposals sized to your situation. A brief without one gets proposals sized to guesses. If you’re not sure what a sensible budget looks like, I’ve laid out what a marketing agency retainer should cost and what it should include.
A one-page marketing RFP and agency brief template
Copy this, fill in each line, and send the same version to every agency.
About our business
- What we sell:
- Who buys it:
- Approximate annual revenue and number of employees:
The problem we’re trying to solve
- What isn’t working, in our words:
- How we know:
What success would look like
- The result that would make this worth it:
- By when:
- How we measure it today, if at all:
- What leadership expects (even if it may be unrealistic):
Our numbers
- What a customer is worth to us:
- The most we’d spend to win one:
Budget
- The range we can commit, and for how long:
- Whether that includes ad spend, agency fees, production and outside costs:
What we’ve tried
- What we did, and what happened:
- What we don’t want repeated:
What’s already in place
- Website platform, CRM and analytics:
- Current vendors:
- Existing research or strategy documents:
What we’ll supply
- Copy, photos, product expertise, approvals, access:
Who decides
- Names and roles:
- Who approves the spend, and who can veto:
- How quickly we make decisions:
- Who will manage the agency day to day:
Timeline
- Proposals due:
- Decision date:
- Start date, and any hard deadline with the reason:
How we’ll judge proposals
- Our criteria, in order of importance:
- Anything that would rule an agency out:
Please answer in your proposal
- What should we expect from this budget, and how soon?
- What would you need to see before telling us to change direction?
- What drives your price?
- What’s not included, and how are changes priced?
- Who will do the work, and how much of their time is ours?
- What does the first month include?
- Where have you solved a problem similar to ours?
- Your recommended scope, plus one leaner option at a lower figure we name.
- What accounts, data and work will we own, and what happens to them if we leave?
- What would make this a poor fit for your agency?
How to fill it in well
Keep it short. The core brief should fit on a page or two; attach supporting reports separately if the work needs them. Write what you actually mean.
Replace adjectives with sentences. “We want to look modern” tells an agency nothing. “Buyers meet us for the first time on our website, and we need to look like a company that’s been doing this for twenty years” tells them a lot.
Include the expectations leadership actually holds, even ones you suspect are unrealistic. Better to have agencies address them now than discover them in month three.
Be specific about what you’ll supply. Proposals differ wildly when agencies guess differently about who writes the copy, provides the photos or handles approvals.
Name who decides each thing, including who approves the spend and who can veto. A proposal the person running the search likes, but can’t defend to whoever approves the money, tends to stall late.
Settle disagreements first, or say so. If your leadership team disagrees about the direction, either settle it before the brief goes out or say so openly. A brief that hides a disagreement produces proposals that satisfy whoever wrote it, and the disagreement resurfaces after you’ve signed.
The process that makes proposals comparable
Invite about three agencies, and a fourth only if its approach is genuinely different. Pitching costs agencies real money, and a well-run agency has every reason to decline a search that looks like a fishing expedition.
Agree on your criteria in writing before any proposal arrives, so the goalposts can’t move once you see who’s bidding.
Send everyone the same brief, the same questions and the same response format. If one agency gets a phone call with extra context, share what you told them with the others.
Hold one round of questions, and share every answer with every agency.
Give a decision date, and keep it. For the kind of owner-led search I’m describing, give the whole search a few weeks, not a few days: one week to prepare, a week or two of first conversations, then proposals, reference calls and a decision. A formal review with procurement and several stakeholders will take longer. I walk through the whole search, from shortlist to decision, in how to choose a marketing agency.
Tell the agencies that didn’t win why.
What to ask every finalist
Proposals are hard to compare because every agency packages its work differently. Strip them back to a few questions, and ask every finalist the same ones:
- What should we expect from this budget, and how soon? A good answer separates what the agency can reasonably predict from what it still needs to learn, and tells you what it’s assuming.
- What would you need to see before telling us to change direction? If they can’t say what data would tell you it isn’t working, nobody will know when to stop.
- What drives your price? They should be able to explain the trade-offs, what extra investment buys you and what you’d give up by spending less.
- What’s not included, and how are changes priced? Clear boundaries up front make extra work a routine change order.
- Who’s doing the work, and how much of their time is ours? Names and roles, ideally people you’ve met, and which of them are actually committed to your account.
- Where have you solved a problem similar to ours? It doesn’t have to be your industry. Ask for one or two relevant examples, what the agency was responsible for, and what actually happened.
- What does the first month include? So a lighter first month spent on setup and research isn’t mistaken for slow delivery, and so you can see when real output starts in each proposal.
It’s also worth asking each agency for its recommended scope plus one leaner option at a lower figure you name. Then the trade-offs arrive in the same format, and nobody has to re-quote later.
How to compare proposals on the same terms
Put the answers on one page, one column per agency:
| Row | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Diagnosis | Did they understand your business, or could this proposal go to anyone? |
| Deliverables | What you’ll actually get |
| Exclusions | What isn’t included, and how changes are priced |
| Staffing | Named people, their roles and how much of their time you get |
| Your responsibilities | What you have to supply, and when |
| Measures and review dates | How success is judged, and when you’ll look together |
| Total cost | Fees, plus ad spend, software, licenses and other outside costs |
| Exit | Notice, handover, and what you keep |
The diagnosis row is the one I’d read first. A proposal that never touches what’s particular about your business hasn’t started the work yet. My agency once asked a buyer whether something should come before the website, then let it go and priced the website anyway. We lost to a firm that challenged and refined the request. Challenging a brief is normally how we work. That time we didn’t stay with it, and we should have. The agency willing to question your brief may be the one that’s thinking hardest about it.
If it helps, score each row from 1 to 5 and weight the rows that matter most to you. Don’t obsess over the final score, and keep must-haves separate: an agency that can’t meet one shouldn’t win on a higher average. Before you decide, meet the people who’ll actually do the work and talk to a reference who worked with that team. The value is seeing why one agency scored differently from another. And when two quotes are far apart, compare scope, staffing, production, outside costs and assumptions before deciding what explains the gap. Sometimes one agency is pricing in more thinking. Sometimes one has left something out.
Read every proposal as if you might sign it as the scope of work, because it may become exactly that. If deliverables, exclusions, revision limits and change pricing aren’t stated, ask for them before you decide.
Mistakes that cost you good proposals
Hiding the budget. Without a range, every agency guesses, and you end up comparing proposals sized for three different companies.
Asking for free strategy or spec work. An agency will usually price a project you’ve defined without charging for it. Asking them to work out your strategy before you’ve hired anyone is asking for consulting for free, and many strong agencies won’t do it. If you want to see how they think, pay for a short discovery phase with your top choice. The two U.S. trade bodies for advertisers and agencies, the ANA and the 4A’s, make a similar point in their 2026 pitch principles: where speculative work is part of a review, set clear expectations on its scope, compensation and ownership, including who keeps the rights to ideas developed for the pitch, and they describe paying agencies for their pitch effort as a good-faith gesture.
Inviting too many agencies. A 2023 ANA and 4A’s study, built on interviews with more than 300 U.S. marketers and agency executives, put the cost of taking part in a review at about $204,000 for an agency that didn’t already hold the account, roughly half the $408,500 it cost the client running it. Those figures come from much larger reviews than the searches I’m describing and include a lot of internal cost, so they’re not an estimate for yours. The point is simpler: every extra agency you invite puts real time and money into your decision, and the best ones notice how you run it.
Judging the pitch team instead of the delivery team. The founder in the pitch who never appears again is a classic warning sign. Meet the people who’ll actually do the work, and ask whether they’ve seen what’s being promised.
Moving the criteria after proposals arrive. If the agency you like doesn’t win on your criteria, either your criteria were wrong, which is worth knowing, or you’re about to talk yourself into something.
Before any agency sends a proposal
Write your brief on one page, settle your criteria before anyone sends a proposal, and ask every agency the same questions in the same format.
If you’d rather have someone on your side of the table write the brief and read the proposals, that’s the work I do as an agency hiring advisor. Because I run an agency myself, mine is only on the list if you want it there, and if it is, it answers the same questions and is judged on the same criteria as everyone else. You can start a conversation on Work With Me.
