What should I ask in an SFMC partner RFP?

Why most RFPs select the wrong partner

Most Marketing Cloud staffing RFPs ask for rates and résumés. That selects a body shop. Two partners with the same logo tier can deliver opposite outcomes: one leaves you with a running Cell; the other leaves you with a binder and a rotate-out date.

Procurement likes neat comparisons. SFMC does not reward neat comparisons. Force specificity.

Core questions

Paste these into the RFP and score orally as well as on paper.

• Who is on-point when a journey breaks on a Saturday?
• Are specialists cross-skilled, or do we buy three people for one send?
• What is the onboarding clock, weeks or days?
• Is there a trial window before invoices lock in?
• Can we resize the bench without rewriting the SOW?
• Will the same team operate what they implement?
• Show a production SFMC engagement: architecture decisions and outcomes, not logos.
• How do you handle deliverability incidents: monitoring, escalation, who calls the mailbox provider?
• What does knowledge transfer look like if we later bring work in-house?
• Named people: who seats in week one, and what happens if one rolls off?
• What will you not do in this engagement?

Sample language you can paste

Require named resources for the first ninety days, with replacements that require your approval. Require a written after-hours escalation path with response expectations. Require evidence of cross-skilling or an explicit map of which roles cover which failure modes. Require a trial or paid discovery before a multi-year rate card.

Add a Data Cloud clause if relevant: activation into Marketing Cloud must be in scope for “done,” not merely connector diagrams. Add a deliverability clause: monitoring ownership and incident response must be named, not implied.

Evaluating oral presentations

Listen for specificity. Production operators talk about failure modes, sync delays, re-entry mistakes, SAP drift, journey injection issues. Pitch-deck consultants talk about transformation and synergy. Ask them to whiteboard a contact key decision and the blast radius if it is wrong.

If two vendors score similarly on paper, pick the one that can describe your pain back to you without renaming it into their package.

Attach evidence, not adjectives

Ask finalists to attach a redacted runbook page, a sample QA checklist, and a before/after story with constraints. Adjectives are free. Artifacts take work.

Link the RFP to the right offer language: Coverage for seats, Cell Ops for owned throughput, Data Cloud when activation is unfinished. Mixing intents in one vague RFP is how you get vague proposals back.

After you select

Write success measures into the first month: time-to-first ship, defect rate, continuity of named people, and whether your internal team feels faster or merely busier. Keep the RFP scorecard and reuse it at ninety days.