Write a Marketing Automation RFP: The Complete Guide
If you take away the stress of the marketing automation RFP process, a lot of marketing leaders love to talk about how they’ve boosted efficiency and profitability using marketing automation.
And it can be a lot - getting stakeholder buy-in, securing a budget, talking to vendors, reviewing proposals. It all adds up to months of work and significant back-and-forth with vendors. (Not to mention the incredible amount of paperwork involved).
So some bypass this critical part of the process. And then end up wondering why they have to keep explaining their requirements a dozen times to marketing automation vendors.
If this is you, here’s a step-by-step process for creating a Request for Proposal (RFP) that lays out essential details like your timeline, goals, and budget limitations. It also includes your vendor selection criteria, setting the stage for a valuable long-term vendor partnership.
But before we do that, let’s talk about why you need to get your RFP process right, and the difference between an RFP and an RFQ.
What is A Marketing Automation RFP?
A marketing automation request for proposal (RFP) is a document that outlines project needs in detail. It helps vendors create highly-customized proposals and allows businesses to streamline their vendor selection process as they work on choosing marketing automation software.
Instead of explaining project requirements individually to each vendor, businesses can easily compare the quotes, capabilities, and timelines outlined in vendor proposals.
RFPs are also good for vendors. Project requirements are often extensive, and vendors can screen them to make sure a project makes sense before investing time into a proposal.
Imagine, for example, that you have a set of specific requirements: you need email automation, cross-platform social media capabilities, paid ad campaign optimization features, a customer data platform, data management capabilities, and an omnichannel AI-powered lead generation solution.
Well, there are over 14,000 martech products. Where should you start?
This is when a marketing automation RFP comes into play, helping you identify the right software vendor by broadcasting your requirements and letting qualified vendors come to you with proposals.
Marketing RFP vs. Marketing RFQ
While a marketing RFP includes a detailed project overview and asks for a comprehensive proposal from vendors, a marketing RFQ (request for quotation) focuses on project costs. If you’re requesting an RFQ, you already know what you want; you just want to know the cost.
Let’s say you’re shopping around for a relatively narrow marketing use case: say, enterprise-friendly social media scheduling software. In this case, an RFQ might make sense, especially if leading vendors have roughly comparable features.
RFPs make more sense if you’re procuring complex or highly-customizable products and services. Digital marketing automation usually falls into this bucket due to its huge feature set and reliance on third party integrations; RFPs are also the better choice if you’re heavily weighing options other than price, like expertise, creative solutions, or ongoing support.
Benefits of a Marketing Automation RFP
Marketing automation RFPs aren’t all upside; the main drawback is that it can be a significant upfront time investment to put them together. (Theoretically, during the time it takes to create an RFP, you could have already engaged with a vendor or two and started the procurement process.)
Are the benefits enough to outweigh the upfront time investment? The resounding answer is yes. Despite the upfront work, here are the benefits you get with an RFP:
- Time savings: Rather than explaining your requirements to multiple vendors individually, you can send your RFP and wait for a response.
- Diverse vendor options: RFPs reduce the burden of outreach. That means that instead of limiting your outreach to a small circle of vendors that have been recommended to you (or that you have existing relationships with), it’s easy to scale your procurement process, allowing you to hear from vendors you otherwise might not have.
- Impartial decision-making: You’ve heard the phrase “sales is about relationships.” The negative side of this? Vendors with the most persuasive salespeople might end up getting the contract, sidelining less charismatic vendors who might have been a better fit. By contrast, RFPs reward the vendors who demonstrate that they are best able to meet your needs.
- Identify potential issues early: Since vendors submit detailed project plans as part of their proposals, the RFP process can help you identify gaps and issues early, giving you time to correct them (or choose a different vendor).
RFPs take time. But by putting in the effort up front, you’ll set the stage for greater vendor variety, more informed decision-making, and better outcomes.
The Basic Structure of a Marketing Automation RFP
To create a comprehensive marketing automation RFP, consider including the following sections:
1. Project Overview
The best RFPs are as detailed as possible while helping vendors understand the bigger picture. A project overview is an effective way to make sure vendors understand your goals, challenges, and high-level business requirements before diving into the details.
Your project overview should explain a few things quickly:
- A short description of your company and industry
- Your current marketing setup, along with specific challenges you’re facing
- Goals you have in mind for your marketing automation solution
Armed with this essential information, vendors will understand whether your RFP makes sense for them to respond to. While this section should be concise, it should also provide all the necessary context needed for vendors to understand whether the project is a good fit for them.
2. Company Background
To avoid generic proposals, provide vendors with as much context as possible. In the Company Background section, give relevant details about your company, your industry, and the problems you solve for your customers. It’s also crucial for vendors to have a full sense of your current martech stack.
Focus on the following:
- Company history, mission, and other background information
- Organization size (employees, revenue, etc.)
- Target market and customer base
- Current marketing technology stack
- Any unique aspects to your business that affect your marketing automation goals
With a better understanding of your company and context, vendors will be able to propose tailored solutions—and you’ll get much more value from each proposal you receive.
3. Project Goals
It’s easy for marketing automation integration—like any complex project—to get stuck in the weeds. There are dozens of logistical questions to sort through, from the implementation process to integrating new software with your current tech stack.
That’s why it’s crucial to dedicate a section of your marketing automation RFP to strategic goals. Focus on core questions like:
- Why do you need marketing automation software?
- What are your current marketing and organizational challenges?
- What would you perceive as a “win” that would justify the project?
- Are there broader business goals that this marketing automation initiative needs to support?
If vendors can’t meet your mission-critical needs, they can easily weed themselves out at this stage, resulting in higher-quality proposals.
4. Project Scope and KPIs
“Marketing automation software” is a good umbrella term to define a broad category of products, but it’s incredibly vague if you’re asking for a proposal. Do you need personalization capabilities? How about lead scoring, predictive analytics, or AI chatbots?
In order for vendors to provide a helpful proposal, the first thing you’ll want to do is provide an exhaustive accounting of the key features you need as a part of your marketing automation suite. Examples can help: provide a few use cases showing how you envision your marketing team using the platform.
Apart from that, make sure to include:
- A comprehensive list of marketing automation use cases and features needed
- A differentiation between “must have” and “nice to have” features
- Your current martech stack and integration requirements
- Key performance indicators you’ll use to measure success
Be as detailed and specific as possible about your requirements, but be open to suggestions from vendors. Since they intimately understand the capabilities of their marketing software, they may be able to suggest a combination of martech capabilities that’s more cost-effective and streamlined than what you initially had in mind.
5. Project Timeline
Marketing automation software can have a huge impact on your organization, from customer success to marketing to sales teams. That means the project’s go-live date isn’t just an abstract goal: it affects huge portions of your organization, requiring training, process updates, and space for employee feedback.
Set out a project timeline in your RFP that helps vendors understand your expectations. Be realistic and include buffer time, but specify any parts of the timeline that are non-negotiable.
Include key information like:
- Project milestones and deadlines
- Expected start date and go-live date
- Any business-driven events that impact the timeline
Remember, your potential vendors have done many marketing automation implementations before, and should have a better idea of how long your project may take. If you’re getting timeline pushback in more than a few of your RFP responses, it might be a sign that your timing expectations aren’t realistic.
6. Potential Roadblocks and Challenges
Although vendors may have a deep understanding of their marketing automation platform, you know more about your own organizational hurdles. Looking a few steps ahead, identify roadblocks that might appear during the course of a marketing automation software implementation—for example, legacy software integrations or custom coding. Flag these issues for vendors so they can create a proposal that takes them into account.
Include information like:
- Resource limitations
- Technical challenges
- Organizational or cultural issues (e.g., certain departments that might have slower adoption)
As you flag these issues, you may also want to specifically ask vendors how they would overcome them—they may come up with creative solutions that surprise you.
7. Budget and Budget Limitations
Part of the benefit of sending out an RFP is that you can compare pricing between vendors. But that doesn’t mean you want to omit a mention of your budget entirely.
Without giving guidance, vendors won’t be able to tailor their solutions to your budget—some might include more capabilities than you need, while others might unnecessarily penny-pinch in order to submit a competitive price quote. While you don’t need to share your exact budget, giving vendors an idea of what you’re looking for helps keep proposals in the right ballpark.
Key information to include:
- Budget range (or budget ceiling)
- Specific budget allocation requirements
- Expected payback period or ROI
To avoid future back-and-forth, ask vendors to submit quotes in the format that will be most useful for internal evaluation. If you need a detailed breakdown of costs, or if you’d like to see a quote that breaks different capabilities into different tiers, say so up front in your RFP.
8. Vendor Selection Criteria
Your RFP should be as transparent as possible, and part of that transparency involves advising vendors about your selection criteria. This helps vendors self-select: unqualified vendors may opt not to submit a proposal, while qualified vendors may dedicate more time and energy into responding.
Sharing your evaluation criteria also helps vendors tailor their proposals to what’s most important to you.
Make sure to include:
- Technical and business-focused criteria
- Your priorities for vendor evaluation (e.g., pricing, support, usability)
- Any mandatory requirements or deal-breakers
- Ability to scale as your business needs grow
- Post-implementation support services
If budget and implementation experience are your two most important vendor selection criteria, say so—and watch as your proposals become more relevant.
How to Write And Implement a Marketing Automation RFP
Once you’ve got a general sense of the components of your marketing automation RFP, it’s time to put it together. Here are the key stages.
1. Align Internally and Gather Marketing Automation Requirements
Before you start writing your marketing automation RFP, you’ll want to go on a fact-finding mission. In larger organizations, this might mean holding meetings with relevant stakeholders like marketing, IT, customer support, and sales; in smaller companies, you might just chat with stakeholders informally. Either way, make sure to gather needs, concerns, and ideas from anyone who’s going to be affected.
Information-gathering isn’t the only goal of this process; people are more likely to be enthusiastic champions of the changes you’re proposing if they’ve been involved in the process from the start.
This is also a good time to document your current marketing processes. As you do so, make a note wherever you see pain points that automation might be able to solve; then, highlight your processes and pain points for vendors in your RFP. Once you’ve got your initial list of requirements together, get buy-in from any additional decision makers who will be involved in the vendor selection process.
2. Write the RFP
When writing an RFP, consult the eight-step plan structure outlined earlier in this article to make sure you’re not missing anything. Start by putting an outline in place, and then fill in the blanks based on the consultation you’ve done with stakeholders in your organization.
Make sure the language you use is clear and concise. You’ll also want to use examples of your current challenges and your expected marketing automation use cases. Both of these will contribute to your RFP’s readability and effectiveness.
3. Identify Vendors
When you’re considering who to send an RFP to, there are some obvious first choices: you may already have some vendors in mind, and you can expand your list with recommendations from peers. But you’ll also want to make an effort to expand your vendor selection process outside your immediate circle of relationships.
Look at industry reports and case studies to find vendors used by similar companies, and dig into customer reviews as an initial level of verification.
Diversify your vendor list as much as you can. Make sure to hear from not only well-known incumbents in your industry, but also newer players who may have more innovative, lightweight solutions.
4. Send out RFP to Vendors
Distributing your RFP to vendors is simple, but there are a few things to keep in mind.
First, establish a process: what deadlines do vendors need to meet when responding to the RFP? Who’s the point of contact within your organization that they should reach out to with questions?
Provide as much information as possible to reduce back-and-forth; you may even consider adding a frequently asked questions section, or recording a video that provides more context for vendors.
5. Review Responses against Marketing Automation Needs
Evaluating vendor responses is a big task, especially with large numbers of stakeholders involved and multiple vendors submitting proposals. The best approach is to be methodical. Since you’ve already determined the criteria that are most important to you, you can create a scoring system that assigns points based on the priority of your needs.
That said, there’s also a certain subjectivity inherent to this process. Review vendor responses carefully to make sure that each vendor really does seem to understand your needs; vendors that craft thoughtful, comprehensive proposals that address all of your needs and concerns are more likely to be reliable partners in the long term.
6. Finalize the Budget and Select a Vendor
If you’re lucky, maybe you’ll know who the perfect vendor is after the first time you read their proposal. Or—more likely—it’s a more drawn-out process involving careful comparison. Don’t rush the vendor selection process; if your vendors offer free trials, you may want to take them up on it to help your decision-making process (especially if ease of use is one of your criteria).
Either way, at the end of the RFP process it’s time to do your due diligence, choose a vendor, negotiate pricing and terms, and sign a contract. At this stage, you’ll also want to think about establishing mutually-agreed pricing for future support so you can budget for any ongoing maintenance, integrations, and training needed.
Join For More Marketing Automation Insights
Now you know how to create a marketing automation RFP that saves time, results in higher-quality proposals, and sets the foundation for an excellent vendor partnership. But marketing automation is far from a “one-and-done” project. Technologies change fast; to stay up-to-date, you’ll want to consistently review your processes for inefficiencies and reevaluate your marketing stack.
Fortunately, The CMO exists to keep you updated on the latest in marketing. Check out our articles on the best marketing software and martech startups. And make sure to subscribe to The CMO newsletter to stay up to date on all things marketing and leadership.
