How to Nail Your Marketing Automation RFP Process

New Martech Capability Arrives Weekly. Your Contract Runs for Years.

So, you’re in the market for new martech. Let’s assume that you’ve established beyond a shadow of a doubt that your existing platform can’t do what you need, and a new one is the only option.

(We tend to start with the assumption that your current martech might be good enough, but sometimes the answer genuinely is a new platform. Legacy architecture ages out. Contracts end. It’s fair to ask whether renewing is the right move.)

In that case, you’ll need a marketing automation RFP (request for proposal). A good RFP process does four things:

1. Looks beyond the current product pitch to long-term use cases.
2. Clarifies costs, throughput limitations, support, and the feature roadmap.
3. Identifies the limitations and additional requirements that aren’t captured in the pitch deck.
4. Defines the commercial and technical conditions that will shape value over the contract term.

To get all these answers, you’ll need to talk to vendors. Trial platforms. Test features. Collaborate with colleagues.

Launching straight into an RFP – for marketing automation or any other investment – on the basis of buying new features is almost guaranteed to be a frustrating and expensive endeavour.

The biggest mistake that people are making is assuming that frustrations are caused by the technology they already have. I think if you were to delve a bit deeper and look into what issues they’re having with their marketing automation technology, their processes, their ways of working, their data, anything surrounding the customer experience, then more often than not, it’s not a technology problem or a capability problem.

Chantelle Casey, Principal Solutions Architect

Why Marketing Automation RFPs Look Different In 2026

Budget Pressures

SaaS prices rose 9–25% in 2025. Corporate IT budgets grew just 2.8%, while marketing budgets increased a measly 0.1%.

That’s not great, considering most marketing leaders are under pressure to adopt AI and improve performance.

56% of CMOs say they lack the budget to deliver their 2026 strategy.

Gartner, 2026 CMO Spend Survey.

Confusing Pricing Mechanisms

More vendors are introducing credit- or token-based pricing, especially for AI features. They often reserve the right to alter token ‘costs’ at will. Something consuming 10 tokens today could consume 20 tomorrow, effectively doubling your costs.

It’s also rarely clear what counts as a billable unit, or how tokens are spent. Meaning it’s almost impossible to forecast how pricing changes as activity and usage grows.

This is unlikely to surface in a martech demo. Not because vendors are hiding anything. It’s just that demos focus on what marketing automation platforms can do, not the nuts and bolts of pricing mechanisms and usage limits.

Enterprise marketing automation platforms increase the complexity. They might run several meters at once: active users, data volume, message credits, AI tasks.

We still don’t fully understand the cost of all of these tokens, or what things are really going to cost businesses in a year or two’s time.

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

API and Throughput Limits

I have never seen a tech stack that doesn’t use APIs and middleware. The average enterprise organisation runs dozens of platforms and tools.

And too often, I’ve encountered a situation where a client thought a connection would be simple, only to find out that it needs custom development.

There is a big difference between a platform with API connections and one that connects to your existing tech. Make sure to specifically name all the connections you need when talking to vendors, and find out whether limits exist on the amount of calls or transfers between platforms.

Product Roadmaps

As my colleague Neil mentioned in his article about composable CDPs, there’s a trend in martech toward consolidation and acquisition.

That raises more than a little uncertainty for feature roadmaps. It’s already been a tumultuous few years of vendors racing to out-AI each other. Now we also have to keep an eye out for mergers and acquisitions that could change a platform’s entire focus.

Questions to Raise During a Marketing Automation RFP

Ask Your Own People First

A strong RFP establishes a clear link between the business problem, the capability gap, and the platform’s promised results.

The first step is to map your requirements.

• What are the specific challenges today, and where in the process are they? Find the operational constraint rather than accepting a diagnosis of “the platform is slow”.
• Is that a platform limitation or a consequence of internal decisions? There’s a big difference between an organisation outgrowing a platform, a vendor not keeping pace with the market, and a team that only uses half the available features.
• What have we built as a workaround, and does it still hold? Workarounds often reveal important requirements. Some outlive the original restriction. Others need to be reproduced in new platforms.
• What have we never turned on? Asking your vendor about unused functionality can open doors you didn’t know existed.
• Is it a license gap or a knowledge gap? Unused functionality or poor performance may point to insufficient training or overstretched internal capacity.
• What does success look like – cost, time or revenue? Without a measurable outcome, the selection process will default to comparing features.

Success criteria don’t need to be overly complicated. It can be as simple as lowering the annual license cost by X% or speeding up campaign build time by Y%.

Ideally, though, a marketing automation RFP should come from a customer-centric use case. That’s where you find long-term revenue rather than short-term cost savings or one-off time optimisations.

If it is use-case driven, which it should be, see if you can achieve it on your current tech first…It costs a lot to implement new technology. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of resources. If you are investing that time, then you need to make sure that it’s suitable for your long-term plans as well as your now.

Chantelle Casey, Principal Solutions Architect

Ask the Vendor Second

Our technical consultants are often called in to bridge the gap between a client’s expectations and the platform’s limitations. In most cases, the misalignment can be traced back to questions that weren’t asked about information that wasn’t willingly offered up.

• Can you model the projected cost at two and five times our current volume? The response should include licence fees, usage charges, additional modules, support, and anticipated overages.
• How are costs, tokens, and credits structured? Get clarity on what you’re paying for, and how pricing scales with activity.
• What are the rate limits, and what happens when we reach one? Knowing whether a process will queue or stall, and how long until usage limits reset, is vital.
• What pricing can you change during the term, and what’s the renewal increase limit? These cost mechanisms should be written into the contract and checked by your finance team.
• What new features did you release in the last year, and what’s on the roadmap for next year? A vendor’s recent delivery record gives a useful indication of their roadmap reliability.

The answers have a material impact on how you build your tech stack, not just which platform you pick. For example, if custom attributes are billable, your data model becomes a cost decision. Throughput caps change how you design journeys and segment audiences.

Teams who discover these limitations after go-live need workarounds that slow things down or middleware that adds to costs.

The Vendor Wants to Sell. Do You Need to Buy?

Most frustration with martech’s perceived value doesn’t come from missing features. It comes from overdue updates, disconnected data, unclear processes, or a lack of skills and capacity.

Every martech vendor has a new AI feature to show off. The market grew more between 2024 and 2026 than in the five years prior.

Yet Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey estimates martech utilisation at 49%, with just 15% of organisations qualifying as high performers on ROI.

In reality, most martech vendors know that your incumbent platform has a very similar feature set to the one they’re selling.

That doesn’t mean they’re dishonest – all our technology partners genuinely back their tech, and we wouldn’t work with companies that aren’t worth the subscription costs.

But they’re also not likely to recommend that you try updating or reconfiguring your existing tech over buying theirs.

Make sure you’re not just getting sold by the vendor as to what they can do today. Interrogate them, and make sure they have a roadmap and they’re transparent with you.

Mark Clydesdale, Head of Strategic Consulting

How to Buy Martech That Earns Its Keep

Don’t let shiny new features distract you from what matters. That’s your customers first and foremost. They’re the ones paying for what you sell.

It’s also your team’s wellbeing, your competitive edge, and your long-term growth plans.

If you’re going to put out a marketing automation RFP, make sure that it:

• Connects platform capability to a defined business outcome.
• Models costs in different growth scenarios.
• Defines what you’re paying for (and what you’re not).
• Outlines the vendor’s roadmap across the contract term.

There are plenty of genuine reasons to upgrade or switch platforms. The goal isn’t to talk yourself out of buying. It’s to make a smart investment in martech that delivers ROI – whatever that means to your business.