You know the RFP the moment it lands.
The timeline's tight. The brief reads like someone else wrote it. Half the questions focus on capabilities you don't lead with, but you know exactly which competitor does.
You're not being evaluated. You're being used.
Somewhere, a CFO has told their team they need three quotes before they can sign anything off. You're quote number three. Maybe quote number two. Either way, the decision was made months ago. You're just here to make it look like a proper process.
Congratulations. You're the due diligence dickhead.
This didn't happen in the RFP
The agency that's going to win this? They didn't win it in the proposal. They didn't win it in the pitch. They won it six months ago when one of their team left a genuinely useful comment on a LinkedIn post. They won it when they sent over a case study that happened to be relevant, unprompted. They won it through months of being vaguely present, not pushy, not salesy, just there, until their name became familiar.
By the time the formal process kicks off, they're the safe bet. The known quantity. The one that doesn't require explanation when the CFO asks "who are these people and why should we trust them with $150k?"
You're not competing against their proposal. You're competing against months of accumulated trust and familiarity. That's not a fight you win with a sharper deck and a keener price.
We've all been there
Let's be honest: most agencies have played both roles.
You've been the due diligence dickhead, putting together a proposal you suspected was dead on arrival. You've also been the obvious choice, watching two other agencies go through the motions while you waited for the formalities to wrap up.
The difference between those two positions isn't capability. It's not even reputation, really. It's whether you were in the room, metaphorically, long before anyone started thinking about procurement.
You can't unf*ck six months in a fortnight
The instinct, when you realise you're the backup option, is to try harder. Better case studies. Tighter pricing. More senior people in the room. Maybe a fancy leave-behind or a follow-up video.
It rarely moves the needle.
The problem isn't your proposal. The problem is that you're unfamiliar, and unfamiliar means risky. At this contract value, with this many stakeholders, nobody wants to be the person who championed the agency no one's heard of. If it goes wrong, that's a career problem.
No amount of polish in week two overcomes "I'd never heard of them before this brief landed."
So what actually changes this?
You need to be the familiar name before there's a decision to make.
Not famous. Not "building a personal brand." Just known enough, to the right people, that when the conversation starts you're already on the list.
That means a few things:
Show up where your buyers already are. Not everywhere. You don't need to be prolific. You need to be present in the specific places your actual prospects pay attention; events, communities, publications, the LinkedIn feeds of people they respect. Consistency beats volume.
Create stuff that travels internally. The person who finds you isn't often the person who signs the cheque. Your content might impress a Head of eCommerce, but if they can't use it to make the case internally, it's only done half the job. You need material that speaks to CFOs, CEOs, boards, people who care about risk, payback periods, and what happens when it goes wrong. Not just the craft. The commercial reality.
Nurture before there's intent. The companies who'll buy from you in 18 months don't know they're prospects yet. They're not "in-market." They're not searching. They're just getting on with things. If you only talk to people who are actively looking, you'll spend your whole life fighting for scraps against whoever got there before you.
Stay in touch without being a pain in the arse. Harder than it sounds. Most nurture is either too aggressive (weekly sales emails no one asked for) or too passive (a quarterly newsletter that's basically a press release). The goal is to be useful enough, often enough, that when the need does arise, you're already in their head.
The goal isn't to win more RFPs
It's to make the RFP irrelevant.
You want to be so obviously the right choice that the formal process is just paperwork. A box-ticking exercise that everyone knows the outcome of before it starts.
When that happens, your competitors become the due diligence dickheads. They're the ones spending a week on a proposal that'll get skimmed and filed. They're the ones wondering why their win rate is falling off a cliff despite the work being good.
Meanwhile, you're having a conversation with a prospect who already knows your thinking, has already shared your stuff with their CFO, and just needs to nail down the specifics.
That's not luck. That's what happens when your marketing does its job properly.
One caveat, because I'm not trying to sell you magic
Sometimes you're the third quote because you should be.
The other agency has a real relationship. They've done the work. They're genuinely a better fit for this specific thing. It happens.
Not every deal is yours to win, and pretending otherwise is how you end up chasing the wrong opportunities for the wrong reasons.
But if you're consistently finding yourself in processes where the outcome feels stitched up before you've even started, that's not a coincidence. That's a marketing problem. You're not building enough familiarity, enough trust, early enough in the cycle.
Here's the question
Next time an RFP lands and your stomach sinks because you already know how this ends, ask yourself:
What would we have needed to do, 12 months ago, to be the obvious choice today?
Then go do that. For the prospects who'll be buying a year from now.
Because someone's going to be the safe bet in that process. Someone's going to be the name that doesn't need explaining. Someone's going to walk into a pitch where the only real question is "when can you start?"
It might as well be you.