Bill Bruno is CEO of Celebrus.
Marketing leaders today face a daunting reality: deliver smarter, faster, more personalized customer experiences—all while operating with leaner teams and tighter budgets. The problem? Most martech stacks are bloated with redundant tools, unused licenses and expensive long-term contracts. In a climate where efficiency matters, that model breaks.
Over the past year, I’ve spoken with CMOs across industries—from retail and travel to financial services and gaming—and they’re all wrestling with the same challenge: how to do more with less. The answer isn’t chasing the next shiny platform. It’s about ruthlessly optimizing your stack and getting real with your desired outcomes. Is your current stack already bloated and underdelivering? Are you focused on making it work, or on achieving the initial goals you set out to achieve?
And this is where the myth of the Request for Proposal (RFP) needs to die.
Why RFPs Fail
The RFP was designed to help organizations make “objective” technology decisions. On paper, it sounds smart: define requirements, score vendors and choose the one that checks the most boxes. But in practice, RFPs reward vendors who are the best at filling out forms, not the ones who can deliver real-world outcomes.
Procurement teams often rely on analyst quadrants or legacy vendor lists, which steer them toward the biggest, most established names. But that’s exactly the problem: many of those “leaders” have grown complacent. Some have added layers of complexity that look impressive in a demo but rarely deliver in production. Others have stripped out innovation in favor of protecting long-term contracts.
Meanwhile, the RFP process drags. By the time a contract is signed, business priorities shift, budgets tighten or the competitive landscape has moved on. The irony is that the longer the RFP, the less relevant the result.
Proof Of Concept: A Better Framework For Martech Decisions
To find success, marketing leaders should define business outcomes, not features:
Set Objectives Tied Directly To Business Metrics
This means revenue growth, retention, churn reduction and fraud prevention. If a vendor can’t show progress against those metrics in weeks, they’re not worth your time.
Insist On Real-Time Demos In Your Environment
Many platforms look flawless when demoing with canned datasets. Very few can ingest, unify and act on your customer data in milliseconds. That’s the difference between a flashy presentation and operational reality. The best test is a live bake-off: run two vendors side by side against your current solution and see who delivers.
Measure Rigorously, Decide Quickly
A proof of concept (POC) shouldn’t drag on for months. Within weeks, you should know whether a tool delivers. Build clear success criteria and define what failure looks like.
I’ve seen what happens when companies skip this discipline. One financial services firm I recently spoke with had invested in nearly every customer data tool on the market. Each one generated slightly different results, but none delivered what the business really needed. When we finally ran a controlled bake-off between two vendors, it became obvious within weeks which platform could act on the insights in real time instead of just producing reports.
The lesson was clear: the POC revealed in days what years of RFP-driven contracts had failed to deliver.
RFPs Waste Time And Money
The harsh truth is that RFPs are more about optics than outcomes. They create the illusion of due diligence while locking enterprises into expensive, long-term contracts that underdeliver.
In tighter economic conditions, marketing and data leaders don’t have the luxury of illusions. They’re being asked to prove measurable business impact now. Tools that can’t show value within weeks, not years, should be cut, and there should be exit strategies set in advance. That way, you avoid the trap of auto-renewing underperforming platforms just because “we’ve already invested so much time.”
If your procurement process still revolves around RFPs, it’s time to rethink it. The vendors who can transform your business aren’t the ones with the slickest PowerPoint or the most analyst badges. They’re the ones who can prove in your environment, with your data, that they can deliver results.
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