A loyalty platform, a medical-tech client, and the RFP response that sparked a new discipline: procurement intelligence

An RFP will tell you who fits the box. It won’t tell you who can change it. Here are a few thoughts on how brands should govern the choice of a partner – and what happened when we answered different questions than the ones we were asked.

The loyalty and marketing-services industry is crowded. The providers are many, capabilities blur together, and the pressures on price never really let up. If you have spent time on either side of a partner search, you know how quickly a strategic decision can collapse into a line-item comparison.

I have spent 33 years mostly serving the client side of this business — building programs, running loyalty marketing and technology companies, and sitting through more partner selections than I can count, from both seats. And I have come to believe something slightly uncomfortable about the instrument we most often utilize to make these decisions: the RFP.

While the RFP is a fine tool for procurement, it can be a limiting one for partnership.

By design it flattens difference – it asks every respondent the same questions, weights price heavily and rewards the answers that fit the box. It can be very good at telling you who is cheapest and compliant. It may not be very good at telling you who will change what is possible for your business.

Which raises a question I think every brand or agency should sit with before issuing one: how should we govern the decision to choose a partner? What are we trying to achieve, and is the framework we have chosen even capable of surfacing it?

Because the most valuable partner may not be the one who answers your questions best – it could be the one who notices you might be asking the wrong ones.

One lesson I keep relearning: when a client invites you into what can be perceived as a race to the bottom, a valuable move may be to create a different kind of race. Here is a story of one such moment – and what it taught me about partner selection and the loyalty platform technology we use to serve clients.

A client Tricycle Studios has served for more than a decade – a global medical-technology company – sent us an RFP earlier this year. The document carried that unmistakable subtext: they were refreshing their roster of creative agencies, the field was crowded, and we were being asked to defend our place. Ten evaluation criteria, with pricing weighted heavily.

We could have answered the way the document asked: here are our rates, our reel.

Instead, we asked a different set of questions. What is a company trying to solve when it sets out to “consolidate agencies”? About being able to see if the work is helping achieve objectives: whether any of it sells product? This client had work flowing through many agencies, tens of millions in annual creative spend, every asset under exacting regulatory scrutiny – and no unified, governable view of any of it.

Fewer agencies would not fix that. So, we decided not to answer purely as a creative agency competing on price. We had a different instrument – and it came from a category these industries almost never associate with creative governance.

A loyalty platform.

We took InsightsOutward – the enterprise loyalty platform we had spent years implementing – and showed the client what it would look like to govern their entire creative operation on it, not only the work that ran through Tricycle Studios, but the work flowing through all their agency relationships.

We answered each of the ten criteria through the platform. Measurement: every campaign and asset scored automatically. Approvals and quality review: a workflow where the clock starts when a brief lands and runs through every stage, so every rework loop is counted and attributed to whoever caused it.

We did not present this only on slides. We stood up a live instance, built from the same blocks we use to run enterprise loyalty programs and pointed them at creative-brief management and vendor governance instead.

Then we showed the part that changes a room: creative assets scored in real-time by our AI layer – on clarity, on emotional engagement, on brand adherence, and on the two bars that govern their world: the medical-legal-regulatory and FDA standards every asset must clear. Problems surfaced and solved, before a human reviewer saw them. Because the platform integrates into the systems they already run, we could connect a piece of creative to the product sales it drove.

The next morning, our client’s head of procurement emailed directly. He did not want to talk about rates. He wanted the deeper demonstration, and a conversation about implementation.

That was the moment a creative-agency RFP stopped being about creative agencies. The idea for what became a new discipline we now call procurement intelligence was born in that response.

There are two lessons here, and only one of them is about technology.

The first I would offer to anyone in our community who advises a brand through a partner search. An RFP will tell you who fits the box; it will not tell you who can change the box. If you want the second kind of partner, govern the decision differently – leave room for a respondent to reframe the problem, and weight that reframing as heavily as the rate card. The most valuable answer we gave was not to a question they had asked.

The second is about our own industry, and it still surprises me after thirty years. The behavioral science and platform infrastructure we have built for loyalty were never only about points or currencies. They are about measuring relationships, scoring behavior, and improving at scale.

Focus that capability at any relationship that can be measured and improved – including the one between a brand and the agencies it pays – and it changes what is possible. It turns out a vendor ecosystem is simply another set of relationships, described as a journey, measured by behavior, and shaped by incentive.

So, when a client invites you into a race to the bottom, build a different race. And when you are the brand doing the choosing, notice which partners are still running the race you set, and which one quietly drew a new track.

About the Author

Michael Hemsey brings 33 years of loyalty marketing and technology leadership to Tricycle Marketing. Before joining as President & CEO, he served as EVP of Merkle’s Loyalty Solutions Group — one of the largest dedicated loyalty practices in the Dentsu network — and spent nine years as President of Kobie Marketing. Earlier career roles at TSYS (ESC Loyalty) and BroadVision gave him a foundation that spans loyalty mechanics, financial technology, and enterprise software. He joined Tricycle because he had seen every incumbent in the market — and recognized that InsightsOutward was architecturally in a different category.