Include your regulatory constraints and review process, current platform and known pain points, target markets and languages, and evaluation criteria weighted toward genuine sector experience — a generic web RFP template omits exactly the details that determine whether a response is realistic.
Your MLR or equivalent review process and typical turnaround, target markets with any known regulatory variation, HCP verification requirements if relevant, and existing brand or platform governance from a parent company — all of this changes what a realistic proposal looks like.
Ask agencies directly how they have handled regulatory review integration, multi-market rollout, and HCP verification on previous projects, with specific examples, rather than accepting generic capability statements — see how to choose a pharma web agency for what to actually look for.
Avoid over-specifying the technical solution in the RFP itself; describe the problem and constraints and let responding agencies propose an approach, which tells you more about their thinking than a checklist they can simply confirm.
Often more useful is requiring a scoped estimate after a discovery phase, since fixed pricing before real scoping tends to be inaccurate in either direction: too high to win the bid comfortably, or too low to survive the actual project. A discovery-based estimate is a more honest starting point.
Three to five is typical, enough for a real comparison of approach and pricing without turning the evaluation itself into a large, drawn-out project. Inviting more rarely improves the decision and mostly adds evaluation burden without proportionate benefit to the final choice you make at the end.
Not necessarily; a full RFP process suits a large, multi-market build more than a smaller, single-market project with a narrower scope. See how to brief a pharma web agency for a lighter-weight approach that still covers the regulatory and process details a generic brief would miss.
The technical solution. Describing the problem and constraints and letting responding agencies propose their own approach tells you more about how they think than a checklist they can simply confirm. Over-specifying the solution also risks ruling out an approach you had not considered but would have preferred.
Send us your RFP and we will respond with specifics, not generic capability language.