Proposal or RFP? How Montreal buyers actually buy web, CRM, and IT work

Most Montreal companies buying a website, a CRM build, or managed IT should skip the formal RFP and run a short, structured proposal process instead. An RFP earns its cost when you must be able to defend the choice to a board, a funder, or a public procurement rule. For everyone else, it produces long documents, slower answers, and vendors who write to a scoring grid rather than to your problem.

We sit on both sides of the table. We write proposals every week from Montreal, and we answer the occasional RFP. Here is how we tell the two processes apart, and how to run either one well.

The question that decides it

Ask yourself one thing: who has to approve this, and what will they ask to see?

• If the approver is you, a partner, or a small leadership team, they will ask to see the work, the price, and the people. A proposal covers that.
• If the approver is a committee, a public body, or a funder with audit rules, they will ask to see a documented, comparable, evaluated process. An RFP covers that.
• If your own policy says "three bids above a threshold", you are in RFP-lite territory. A structured brief sent to three vendors with common criteria satisfies the spirit.

The mistake is running a formal RFP for a decision a leadership team could make in two weeks. The opposite mistake, a single verbal quote for something that touches your customer data and your public site, is rarer but more expensive.

What a proposal process looks like in practice

For a typical SME or mid-size project, this takes two to four weeks and costs you perhaps six hours:

1. A one-page brief. What you sell, who your customers are, what the website or system must do within twelve months, the current stack, any hard constraints (language, privacy, integrations, deadlines).
2. A discovery call, 30 to 45 minutes. A good vendor will ask more than they present. If a vendor offers a quote before understanding your sales process, treat the number as a guess.
3. A written proposal. Not a deck. A document you can forward to your CFO and your lawyer.
4. A follow-up call to challenge it. Ask what is not included, what would change the price, and what happens if the scope turns out wrong.
5. A decision with a reason. Write down why you chose. It helps in month six when the memory fades.

If you send us a brief and a short list of what you already have, we can usually say within a call whether we are the right fit. Sometimes the answer is no, and we say so.

What belongs in the proposal

We would hold any vendor, including ourselves, to this list:

• Scope in plain language. What you will receive, in terms a non-technical colleague could check.
• Out of scope. The sentence that prevents the argument in month three.
• Price or range, and what moves it. Fixed price where scope is fixed; a range with named assumptions where it is not.
• Timeline and your part in it. Content approvals, access, decisions. Most delays come from the client side, and the proposal should say so politely.
• People. Who does the work, who answers the phone.
• Languages. Which pages and which support language, with the French-first split spelled out when Bill 96 applies.
• Hand-off. Who owns the hosting, DNS, repository, and tenants after launch. If this line is missing, ask for it.
• After launch. Whether there is a retainer, and what you get if there is none.

A proposal without a hand-off clause is a proposal for a rental.

When an RFP is the right tool

An RFP is justified when:

• A public-sector rule, a grant, or a board policy requires it
• Several internal stakeholders disagree and need a documented comparison
• The project is large, multi-year, and the scope genuinely needs vendors to compete on approach

When you write one, a few habits will save everyone time:

• Describe the problem and the outcome, not only a feature list. A feature list invites copy-paste answers.
• Share your evaluation criteria and weighting. Vendors can then respond to what you will actually score.
• Allow a question period. The best questions often reveal the scope you forgot to write down.
• Keep it short enough that a small, good studio can answer it without hiring a bid writer. If only the largest vendors can respond, you are filtering for size, not fit.

What vendors read between the lines

Both processes send signals. Vendors notice:

• Whether the buyer will talk to them before the deadline
• Whether the budget is stated, even as a range
• Whether anyone internal will own the project after launch
• Whether the real decision-maker is in the room

You get better proposals when you share a budget range. It does not mean paying the top of it. It lets the vendor propose the best option inside it, rather than guessing and padding.

How Montreal buying differs

A few patterns we see repeatedly in Quebec:

• Relationships and references matter, but they are checked. Expect a call to a previous client, and offer yours.
• French is a scoping item. If the project is Quebec-facing, ask which pages launch in French, who writes them, and who supports French enquiries after launch.
• Privacy is part of the brief. Law 25 questions about where data is stored and which processors touch it should appear in the proposal, not in a later negotiation.
• Decisions can take time and then move quickly. A silent two weeks is common. Follow up politely and keep the proposal valid long enough to survive it.

Choosing between proposals

Compare on the same criteria, in this order: understanding of your problem, clarity of scope, fit of the team, risk (what could go wrong and who carries it), and only then price. A low number with vague scope is usually a high number delayed to month three.

Also ask each vendor one practical question: *What would you tell me not to build?* A vendor who answers honestly is easier to trust with the rest.

Starting with us

If you are comparing options for a site, a CRM, or search, a discovery call is a low-commitment way to find out whether we fit. It runs about 30 minutes, weekdays between 9 and 17 ET. Bring the brief if you have one, or a rough description if you do not. We will tell you what we would do first, what we would skip, and roughly what it would cost to find out.

Write to hello@aervio.io, call +1 438-498-3913, or book the discovery call. If you are weighing Next.js against WordPress as part of the decision, our note on choosing between them in Quebec is a useful pre-read, and so is the one on why the site, CRM, and search belong in one system.

Questions

Do we need an RFP for a website project?

Usually not below a few tens of thousands of dollars, unless a policy or a funder requires one. A written brief and two or three proposals compared on the same criteria gets you most of the value with far less cost on both sides.

What should a good proposal include?

Scope in plain language, what is explicitly out of scope, a price or range with what moves it, a timeline with your responsibilities, named people, and a hand-off clause covering who owns the accounts and code.

Will AERVIO respond to an RFP?

Yes, when the scope fits what we do and we can read the evaluation criteria before writing. We would rather ask questions first than submit a polished answer to the wrong problem.