Key takeaways
• A large pool of PR agencies doesn’t make it easier to find the right one for you.
• A short qualification stage can establish relevance before either side makes a bigger investment of time.
• Useful early questions reveal how an agency thinks, not just what it has done for other clients.
When looking for a new PR agency, there’s an obvious temptation to cast the net widely. The right agency could come from a recommendation, an existing relationship, a specialist search, an agency directory, or an open invitation. The more potential partners you hear from, the less likely you are to miss someone who could be a great fit. Right?
But there’s a point when a broad search becomes unmanageable. We’ve heard from prospective clients who’ve received well over 50 proposals in response to a single RFP (request for proposal) published on LinkedIn. And this isn’t a problem unique to large consumer brands. It happens in niche industrial B2B markets too, particularly when an opportunity is publicly advertised and attracts both specialist agencies and generalists.
The challenge changes from finding agencies to finding the agencies worth spending more time with. A proposal can tell you a lot but reading dozens of them doesn’t necessarily give you a better understanding of which agencies would make the strongest long-term partner.
From our side of the table, we’ve experienced something that can make agency selection much more focused: qualification before the full pitch.
A little information can tell you a lot
During the most recent qualification stage we’ve been through, the client wanted to understand the fundamentals first: relevant experience, geographical capability, capacity, and potential conflicts of interest. That information alone would have been useful, but what made the process truly stand out were the questions that followed.
Rather than requesting credentials, they asked us to submit in an email the top reasons we believed we’d be a particularly strong fit. That required us to condense all our strengths into the ones that mattered the most to that client.
They also asked what we saw as the most significant external communications opportunity for their organisation. Again, rather than producing a strategy, we were being asked to share our thoughts about the brand, its audience, and communications challenge. And that’s the most valuable thing we can offer: our editorial thinking.
There is a danger, of course, in trying to solve the problem of too many proposals by creating another proposal process. If an initial qualification round asks agencies for a strategy, campaign ideas, team biographies, and pricing, it has simply become a smaller RFP. The initial response should reveal whether there is enough potential to justify a proposal.
The shortlist should make the next stage more interesting
The benefit isn’t just fewer proposals to compare but better conversations. If the agencies reaching the next stage are already credible on experience, capability, capacity, and relevance, the full RFP can focus on the things that are harder to assess such as:
• How do they approach the challenge?
• What do they prioritise?
• How do they turn technical complexity into stories that matter to the audience?
• How do they think about media relations, content, measurement, and impact?
• Can you see yourselves working well together?
The right conversation is more valuable than the biggest shortlist
We’re not suggesting that a smaller number of agencies is automatically better. Sometimes it makes sense to explore a broad market. Sometimes a specialist requirement means there are only a handful of genuinely relevant agencies out there. Sometimes an open process uncovers a fantastic wild card agency that would never otherwise have been considered. The point is simply that not every agency needs to be evaluated to the same depth.
Choosing a PR agency is ultimately about much more than finding an organisation that can deliver the required services. You need a partner that understands your market, will challenge your thinking when necessary, will find stories where others might not see them, can work comfortably with subject matter experts, and can turn complex business issues into communications that people actually want to engage with.
From where we sit, a thoughtful qualification stage isn’t just about reducing the number of proposals clients have to compare. It’s to help both sides get to the right conversation sooner with a clearer sense of why they’re there and what they need to find out from each other.
Hannah Kitchener
Associate Director
About the author
Hannah is an associate director in the UK, leading strategic campaigns for industrial clients across the EMEA region. A professionally qualified journalist (NCTJ), she combines specialist sectoral knowledge in construction, energy, and materials handling with a strong network of trade media contacts to secure valuable coverage. Her expertise in inter-cultural communication, honed by degrees in modern languages and translation, is key to executing campaigns that succeed across diverse European markets.
