The RFP Is a Lagging Indicator
I’ve spent the last year looking at hundreds of website RFPs. More recently, I started going back after the fact to see what actually happened. Who won the work? Were they local? Had they worked with similar organizations before? What did their portfolio look like? Was there anything about their experience, positioning, or relationship to the buyer that made the win make more sense?
The deeper I get into that research, the more I think we tend to look at RFPs too narrowly.
The RFP matters, obviously. It’s the moment when the opportunity becomes public, the scope takes shape, the budget becomes real, and agencies get invited to compete. But it is almost never the beginning of the buying process. By the time a $50,000 or $100,000 website RFP shows up, someone inside that organization has probably already been thinking about the project for months.
Maybe the website has become difficult to manage. Maybe leadership changed. Maybe they received funding. Maybe a rebrand is underway. Maybe accessibility has become a bigger issue. Maybe the communications team has been complaining about the same problems for three years and finally got approval to do something about it.
By the time we see the PDF, the organization has already gone through some version of recognizing the problem, building internal support, finding money, discussing priorities, and deciding that the issue is important enough to turn into a project. Someone may have researched platforms, looked at other websites, talked to peers, or started looking at agencies. In some cases, vendors may already have been part of those early conversations.
Eventually all of that activity gets turned into a scope, a budget, and a procurement process.
The RFP is a lagging indicator.
If you’re an agency trying to build a more reliable pipeline of bigger projects, that distinction matters. You can get better at finding and winning the opportunities that already exist, and I still think there is a ton of value in doing exactly that. But you can also get better at recognizing the organizations that are moving toward a project before the opportunity becomes public.
Projects leave clues
Website projects rarely come out of nowhere.
An organization launches a new strategic plan. A city approves funding for digital improvements. A nonprofit receives a grant. A university starts a rebrand. An association hires a new communications director. A tourism organization launches a new destination initiative. A board starts talking about problems with the existing website. A CMS is getting old. An accessibility initiative gets funded. A department starts hiring around digital communications.
None of those things mean a website RFP is definitely coming next month. That isn’t really the point. They are signals that something inside the organization is changing, and change creates projects.
If you already know the kinds of organizations you want to work with, those signals give you somewhere to pay attention before the project reaches the procurement portal.
That changes the question.
Instead of only asking, “Where are the website RFPs?”
You can start asking, “Which organizations are becoming likely to issue one?”
That is a different kind of business development.
Most agencies encounter a buyer at the RFP stage. The opportunity gets posted, you find it, and now you have two or three weeks to understand the organization, figure out what really matters to them, decide which work in your portfolio is relevant, develop a point of view, and turn all of that into a convincing proposal.
You’re building context on demand.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Agencies win projects that way all the time. But compare that with an agency that has already been operating in the buyer’s world for a while.
Maybe they work with similar organizations. Maybe someone from the buyer’s team has seen them speak, read something they published, or heard about them from a peer. Maybe their portfolio contains two projects that immediately make sense in the context of this one. Maybe they noticed the initiative that eventually became this project six months earlier and have been paying attention ever since.
When the RFP arrives, they are not beginning from zero.
The winning agency often makes sense in hindsight
One of the things I’ve been paying closer attention to in the winner research is proximity, and I don’t just mean geography.
Sometimes the winning agency is local or regional. But I also keep seeing other forms of proximity: industry proximity, experience proximity, network proximity, and problem proximity.
The agency has already worked with municipalities. Or associations. Or higher education. Or tourism organizations. They’ve handled large content migrations, accessibility requirements, complicated integrations, multilingual sites, or whatever else happens to matter in that buyer’s world.
When you look at the winner afterward, the connection often makes sense.
That doesn’t mean the project was predetermined, and it certainly doesn’t mean an unfamiliar agency couldn’t have come in and won. It means the buyer had less of a leap to make.
The agency didn’t have to spend the entire proposal saying, “Trust us, we can probably handle this.” They could point to evidence that they already had.
That evidence matters during procurement, but it starts working long before procurement.
This is why I’ve started looking at portfolios and case studies differently too. A case study isn’t only there for the person who has already decided to hire an agency. It can also reach the person who is still figuring out what their project should even look like.
They may be asking: Who has done this before? Who understands an organization like ours? What problems did they run into? What did they recommend? What should we be thinking about before we even start procurement?
A useful case study can answer those questions before the buyer is officially shopping. It can help them understand their own project while making your relevance obvious at the same time.
That is much more useful than simply proving you make nice websites.
Being early doesn’t mean gaming procurement
Especially with public-sector work, there are rules, and there should be.
The goal isn’t to get around the competitive process or somehow maneuver yourself into a contract before anyone else gets a chance to bid. If the project requires an RFP, you still have to compete. You still need a strong proposal. You still have to meet the requirements and prove you’re the right firm for the work.
The advantage is simpler than that.
Be known before the competition starts.
Understand the market before the opportunity exists.
Make your relevant experience easy to find.
Build relationships with the kinds of organizations and people who regularly encounter the problems you solve.
And pay attention to the signals that tell you demand may be forming.
That could mean following funding announcements, strategic plans, leadership changes, board discussions, rebrands, new initiatives, or whatever else tends to happen upstream from the projects you want.
It could mean publishing something genuinely useful about a problem your buyers keep running into.
It could mean becoming known for a particular class of work instead of presenting yourself as another agency that can build almost anything for almost anyone.
The point isn’t to start pitching organizations twelve months before they need you. The point is to understand where demand comes from and make yourself easier to encounter while that demand is forming.
I still spend a lot of time finding website RFPs, and I still think agencies should. There are millions of dollars in publicly available projects sitting in procurement portals, board packets, government websites, and association pages right now.
But lately I’ve become just as interested in the step before that.
Who just received funding?
Who is going through a rebrand?
Who hired a new marketing leader?
Whose board is discussing the website?
Who has digital modernization in next year’s budget?
Who is launching an initiative the current website clearly wasn’t built to support?
Those aren’t opportunities yet. Some of them may never become website projects at all.
But some of them will.
And an agency that learns how to recognize those signals is building a different kind of pipeline. They’re not only reacting to projects once they become public. They’re learning to recognize demand before procurement puts a deadline on it.
The RFP is still important.
It’s just not the beginning.
And if the first time a buyer encounters you is when your proposal lands in their inbox, you’re entering the buying process at the last possible moment.
