B2B lead generation RFP: the pack you can send to any agency

This pack is for hiring an agency to generate business buyers, not to close them. Scope it as everything that happens from first touch through a defined handoff stage: paid search, LinkedIn or other account based ads, gated content offers, and an email nurture sequence that moves a contact toward sales readiness. State the handoff stage explicitly in the document, whether that is a booked call, a completed discovery form, or a status change in your CRM.

Be just as clear about what is out of scope. Cold outbound calling, sales demos, proposal writing, and account management after handoff are separate disciplines with separate pricing; do not let a bidder fold them into one number unless you asked for them. If you also want SEO or a rebuilt landing page as part of this engagement, name that as its own line item with its own price, because it changes both the timeline and the skill set required.

Name your ideal customer profile and the industries or company sizes that qualify, since a B2B vendor optimizing toward the wrong company size will hit a lead count while missing your actual buyers entirely.

A capable vendor cannot build a lead engine blind, so plan to give read and write access to the relevant stages of your CRM pipeline, not full administrator rights to the whole system. Pair that with twelve months of closed won and closed lost history if you have it; without that history, a vendor is scoring leads by guesswork instead of by what has actually converted for you before.

Give them your ideal customer profile document, existing sales collateral, and admin access to your LinkedIn Company Page if account based ads are in scope. Ad account access should be granted at an appropriate role level under your own billing profile, not transferred into an account the vendor owns outright.

If you already run marketing automation, hand over the current lead scoring model and any existing nurture sequences so the vendor is building on what exists instead of quietly replacing it without telling you.

State plainly that every contact record, list, and pipeline stage inside your CRM belongs to you, regardless of which vendor built the campaigns that fed it. This should not be a negotiating point at the end of a contract; put it in the RFP so every bidder prices their proposal knowing they do not own your list.

Ad accounts should stay under your own billing profile from day one so there is nothing to transfer later. Content assets built for this engagement, gated guides, case studies, calculator tools, and their source files, should transfer to you on request. Ask specifically whether LinkedIn matched audiences or retargeting lists built during the engagement can be exported or rebuilt under your own account, since some platforms do not let audience data move between ad accounts cleanly.

Get a written exit timeline: how many business days the vendor has to hand over access, documentation, and open items once either side ends the agreement.

Set month one as a setup milestone with a concrete acceptance test: campaigns live, conversion tracking firing correctly, and CRM fields mapped so every lead records its channel and campaign. Do not let month one count toward your lead volume target; it is infrastructure, and treating it as production time hides a slow start.

From month two, measure MQL volume against the definition you wrote into this RFP, then measure the rate at which those MQLs become SQLs once your own sales team engages them. A vendor's dashboard is not the source of truth here; the report should be built from your CRM's own stage changes, since that is the only version both sides can trust.

Require a written monthly report that breaks results out by channel and by ICP fit, not a single combined number that hides which channel is actually producing buyers.

Weight proposals toward evidence of B2B specific experience over generic lead generation claims. A reasonable starting split: 20 percent for direct experience with your CRM or marketing automation platform, 25 percent for a channel plan built around your named ICP rather than a generic template, 20 percent for reporting that ties to CRM stages instead of vendor dashboards, 15 percent for clear, itemized pricing, and 20 percent for references from other B2B accounts, not consumer or ecommerce work.

Score down any proposal that talks about lead volume without once mentioning MQL to SQL conversion, since that usually signals a vendor built for consumer lead generation applying the same model to a business buyer with a much longer decision process.

Ask every reference the same three questions so you are comparing answers, not impressions: how long did it take to see a qualified lead, did the vendor's numbers match the client's own CRM, and what happened to the account when the client wanted to leave.

Put these directly in the RFP and require a written answer from every bidder before you score them: How do you define an MQL and an SQL, and will you accept our definition if it differs from yours? Will our leads, lists, or account level data be used for or sold to any other client? What happens to our CRM setup, sequences, and reporting if we end the engagement? If our sales team never follows up with a lead you generated, does it still count toward your target, and how do you handle that in reporting?

Also ask what average sales cycle length they have seen on accounts similar to yours, and ask them to show, not just describe, a redacted example of a monthly report from a comparable B2B client. A vendor who cannot produce one has probably not run this kind of engagement before.