The questions RFPs are good at
A well-crafted RFP is a real signal. It shows a team has done their homework. It surfaces genuine requirements, like accessibility standards, integration complexity, timeline pressure, governance needs, that help both sides figure out whether there’s a fit. But after years of responding to RFPs and helping clients evaluate agencies, I’ve noticed a consistent gap in what they ask. RFPs are good at surfacing capability. They’re less good at surfacing accountability. They ask about methodology, technology stack, how we handle change orders and QA and post-launch support. All legitimate. But almost no RFP asks the question that most reliably predicts whether the partnership will actually work:
Who will be doing this work?
Why this question matters more than the others
Capability is table stakes. Any agency worth reviewing can produce a case study portfolio, describe a discovery process, and present a thoughtful project plan. Evaluating on capability alone doesn’t distinguish between agencies that operate very differently, and those differences matter at the worst possible times: When scope gets complicated; When a key decision point surfaces six weeks in; When something breaks at launch and someone needs to own it at 11pm.
In those moments, what you want isn’t a process. It’s a person. A senior person who has context on your project, who understands the decisions that got you here, who feels accountable to the outcome, not just to the deliverable. That person exists at some agencies. At others, by the time the project hits a real stress point, the team has turned over. The people who scoped the work are managing other accounts. The execution was handed to a contractor who wasn’t in the room when the architecture was decided.
This isn’t a worst-case scenario. It’s a structural reality for how a lot of agencies are built, and RFPs don’t ask about it.
What the question actually reveals
Asking “who will do the work?” sounds simple. The answers are not.
Are the people executing this work dedicated to your agency, or are they shared across multiple firms? Some agencies staff projects with contractors who are simultaneously working for three other shops. The commitment, and the context, is divided accordingly.
Are they integrated into your team, or managed through a vendor layer? Outsourcing through subcontractors adds communication overhead, accountability gaps, and translation loss between what the client said and what the team builds. The further execution gets from the people who made the commitments, the more gets lost.
Will the same people be on this account from kickoff through launch and beyond? Continuity isn’t just about relationships. It’s about the accumulated context that makes the difference between a team that catches problems early and one that inherits them.
Who was actually in the room when the estimate was built? If the people scoping the work aren’t the people doing it, there’s a gap. Someone has to translate the estimate into execution, and something gets lost in that translation every time.
These questions feel operational and they are. But they’re also the clearest indicator of whether “partnership” in the pitch deck means the same thing as “partnership” at month six.
How to ask it
Add this to your RFP:
“Describe who will actually execute this engagement. Are they dedicated to your agency, or do they work across multiple firms? Are they integrated into your internal team, or managed through a vendor or subcontractor layer? Will the same people be on this account from kickoff through launch and into any post-launch support period? What is your firm’s approach to staffing continuity?”
You’ll get different answers. Some will be evasive. Some will answer a slightly different question. Some will give you a direct, specific response that tells you exactly what to expect. That variance is exactly the point. The question doesn’t have a right answer, but it has honest ones, and it has answers designed to get past the question without really engaging it. Learning to tell the difference is most of the work.
What we tell clients who ask us
At Modern Tribe, we don’t outsource. The people scoping the work do the work. The team that builds your platform is dedicated to this agency, integrated into how we think, how we communicate, and how we take ownership. The senior leads who are in the room at kickoff are the same ones accountable at launch, and after. It’s a specific structural choice, not just a talking point. It means we may be more expensive than some alternatives. It means we take on fewer projects than agencies that scale on contractor volume. What it produces, consistently for 20 years, is work that holds up, relationships that last, and teams that feel genuinely invested in what they built.
I tell clients to ask this question not because I’m certain we’ll win when they do. I tell them to ask it because the honest answer matters more than the comfortable one. And because a project that goes well starts with a question that surfaces what kind of partner you’re actually getting.
Modern Tribe designs and builds scalable digital ecosystems for enterprise organizations — complex websites, applications, and platforms, built by a dedicated team. If you’re evaluating agencies for your next engagement, let’s talk.