B2B marketing RFPs: Where planning breaks down (and how to fix it)

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About this report
Learn where best practices and day-to-day execution diverge across the B2B marketing RFP process.

Why B2B marketing is harder to get right
B2B marketing has become harder to plan before campaigns launch and harder to prove once they’re live.
Teams are managing more channels, platforms, data, and partners than ever before. As a result, many struggle to align on goals before launch, measure performance across channels, evaluate brand impact, and assess whether AI is actually improving results.
Without clear planning, measurement, and reporting processes, it becomes harder to know what’s working, what needs to change, and where to invest next.

Where campaign planning breaks down
To better understand where gaps exist and challenges remain, StackAdapt and Ledger Bennett commissioned NewtonX to survey 426 B2B marketers across North America, the UK, and APAC.
We focused on one of the first steps in campaign planning: the media brief or request for proposal (RFP).
The research points to a clear disconnect: B2B campaigns have become more complex, but many of the processes used to plan, measure, and report on them haven’t kept pace.
This report brings together expert-backed insights and frameworks to help teams set clearer goals, measure brand impact, and evaluate AI more effectively.
What you’ll find inside the report
- Why teams need to define what success looks like before decisions about channels, tactics, and formats are finalized.
- How marketers are managing cross-channel complexity, and why manual data reconciliation makes performance harder to evaluate.
- Why brand goals often make it into the brief, but get pushed aside in favor of short-term and lower-funnel metrics.
- How B2B marketers are asking about AI in briefs and RFPs, and what’s missing from how they evaluate it.


