ArtVersion leadership recently contributed to Entrepreneur with a perspective on how organizations can get more value from the agency selection process.
In Telling an Agency Exactly What to Build Can Limit Your Results. Here’s What to Share Instead, ArtVersion’s Principal and Creative Director examine a common problem with website RFPs: organizations often define the solution before prospective partners have had an opportunity to understand the business challenge behind it.
A detailed scope can make an engagement easier to price, but it can also narrow the range of thinking available to the organization. When the CMS, sitemap, page count and other major decisions have already been prescribed, agencies may be left responding to a predetermined solution instead of helping determine what should actually be built.
Start With the Business Change
For marketing leaders, the article points to a different way of approaching an RFP.
The organization should first explain what has changed in the business and what the new experience needs to accomplish. A company may need customers to understand its offering more clearly. Sales may need stronger support from the website. Marketing may need greater flexibility to publish and adapt content.
Those outcomes give an agency useful context without deciding the solution in advance.
Team also recommends separating fixed requirements from areas that remain open to recommendation. Some constraints may be unavoidable because of infrastructure, security or compliance. Other parts of the proposed scope may simply reflect assumptions that deserve another look.
Make Room for Judgment
The article also encourages organizations to pay attention to how agencies think during the selection process.
The questions an agency asks can reveal more than a capabilities list alone. Strong partners should be able to identify assumptions worth testing and explain the tradeoffs behind different approaches. They should also be comfortable identifying parts of the proposed scope that may need to change.
That becomes especially important on complex website initiatives where marketing is only one stakeholder. Technology requirements, sales priorities and executive alignment can all influence the eventual direction of the project. Giving agencies visibility into that environment helps them understand the real assignment before proposing how to solve it.
Better Inputs Create Better Choices
Budget context matters for the same reason. Without an investment range, agencies may develop fundamentally different approaches that are difficult to compare. A realistic range gives prospective partners enough context to explain what they would prioritize now and what could be phased over time.
For CMOs and marketing leaders, the larger takeaway is straightforward: an RFP should create enough structure to define the challenge while leaving meaningful room for expertise.
The quality of an agency engagement can begin well before design starts. It begins with giving the people being asked to solve the problem enough context to think about it.
Full article, Telling an Agency Exactly What to Build Can Limit Your Results. Here’s What to Share Instead, was published by Entrepreneur on October 28, 2026.