An Hour Wasn’t Enough: My Take on “From Brief to Build”

By Heather Munnell, Senior Director of Client Experience and Strategy, VDA

I have sat through a lot of industry panels. Most of them end the same way — polite applause, a few LinkedIn posts, and a topic that quietly goes back to being nobody’s favorite thing to talk about. “From Brief to Build” did not do that to me. A month later I am still thinking about golf courses in the dark, mattress stores, and the Starship Enterprise; which is not a sentence I expected to write about an RFP webinar.

So let me back up.

We put this session together with BizBash because the RFP process has been bugging all of us for a while, in that specific way where you cannot quite articulate why something feels broken until you get three sharp people in different corners of the industry to say the quiet part out loud. James Lastowski, Stephen Henrich, and JT Long did exactly that, moderated by Shannon Cherry, who kept the whole thing moving and dropped one of my favorite lines of the day almost in passing.

Nobody Actually Wants to Do This

Let’s be honest about something up front: writing an RFP is nobody’s favorite Tuesday. Responding to one is worse. And yet we all keep doing it, because sometimes you genuinely need a cost comparison, sometimes you are vetting a brand-new partner and need everyone starting from the same page, sometimes you are heading into a market where you do not know a single vendor, and sometimes you are simply new to this whole world and the RFP is your only way in. It is a necessary evil. I do not think anyone on the panel disagreed with that framing, and there was something oddly comforting about four industry veterans admitting it without any spin.

What surprised me was how much variation exists under that one three-letter acronym. A two-line email and a ninety-page formal document both get called an RFP, and treating them the same way is where a lot of this goes wrong before it even starts.

The Budget Conversation, or, Golfing in the Dark

If you only remember one line from this whole session, it is going to be Stephen’s. He described responding to an RFP with no budget attached as playing golf in the dark, and I have not stopped using that phrase since. It is funny, but it is also exactly right — you are swinging at something you cannot see, hoping you connect, with no real way to know if you are even aimed at the green.

James followed that up with his own version, comparing it to house hunting with a realtor who has no idea what you can actually afford. “They could show you two million dollar houses and your budget is five hundred thousand,” he said, and I think most of us have lived some version of that scenario, whether it was about a house or an event or honestly a wedding registry.

JT brought the number down to earth in a different way, pointing out that if your budget is not going up with inflation, you have effectively taken a budget cut whether or not anyone said so out loud. That one stuck with me because it reframes a conversation people avoid into a fact people cannot really argue with.

Here is my honest follow-up question for all of us, myself included: why does sharing a number still feel so risky? Nobody on this panel said a budget guarantees a perfect outcome. What they said, repeatedly, is that hitting a stated number is not a failure, it is the whole point. So what would it take for more of us to actually lead with a range instead of guarding it like a poker hand?

Ghosting Is Just Rude, and Other True Things

JT gets credit for the line that made the whole room laugh and wince at the same time: “Whether it’s dating or a business, ghosting is just rude.” She is right, and I think we all know it, and I think we all still do it anyway when the update is uncomfortable to deliver.

Stephen’s answer to that was simple enough that it almost feels too easy: rip the band-aid off. Communicate on a reasonable timeline, even if the update is just “still waiting, nothing yet.” No news is not automatically good news, it is often just somebody avoiding a hard conversation on your behalf.

Shannon’s tarmac analogy is the one I keep coming back to. Nobody loves sitting on a runway waiting to take off, but a pilot who checks in every so often makes the wait tolerable in a way that silence never does. I would love to know how many of us actually build that kind of check-in into our own process, versus how many of us intend to and then quietly do not. I will raise my hand first.

AI: The Superpower With a Six-Fingered Problem

This is the part of the conversation I did not expect to be funny, and yet here we are. James described some of the AI-generated renderings landing in RFP inboxes right now as, in his words, slop, and pointed out that if six fingers is already a known AI problem, wait until the laws of physics stop applying too. He is not wrong. Somebody, somewhere, is currently trying to figure out how to gently tell a client that the floating chandelier from their AI mood board is not, structurally speaking, a real option.

Stephen took it a step further with an analogy I am fully stealing, comparing production build-out to assembling a Starship Enterprise, flying it around the universe for one night, then taking the whole thing apart and shipping it home in boxes. If that does not make you appreciate your production team a little more, I do not know what will.

But nobody on this panel was anti-AI, which I appreciated. JT’s framing was the one that felt most useful to me: AI is not always a reliable narrator, but it is information, and information has to be examined the same way from either side. Stephen went as far as calling it a superpower when it is in experienced hands. The nuance underneath all of it, though, is worth sitting with. AI reflects the priorities of whoever is using it. A team that thinks about safety gets AI output shaped by safety. A client who has never had to think about load limits or bandwidth will not get those guardrails automatically. That is still a person’s job, at least for now.

So here is a real question for our industry to chew on together: as AI gets better at generating the impossible faster, how do we build a shared, honest vocabulary for what is actually buildable before the client falls in love with the idea?

The Part That Actually Got Me

I did not expect an RFP webinar to get a little emotional, but James’s point about storytelling did it. He talked about how putting numbers on a page and sending it in skips the chance to let someone feel the thing you are trying to build for them. JT backed that up with a story from her past running mattress stores, of all things, explaining that a mattress is just a rectangle until you can explain why this rectangle feels and performs differently than the one next to it. Replace mattress with carpet, or Wi-Fi bandwidth, or load-in logistics, and you have basically described half of what makes events hard to sell on paper.

James closed the whole session with a line that I think should be printed somewhere in every agency’s onboarding deck: the more information you can provide up front, the better results you are going to get. It sounds almost too simple to be the takeaway from an hour-long panel, and yet here we are, because apparently the simple thing is the hard thing.

So, What Now?

One hour was never going to fix an industry-wide habit, and I do not think anyone on the panel would claim otherwise. What it did was put a name to some things a lot of us have felt but rarely said in front of a client or a vendor. So consider this an open invitation rather than a conclusion. A few questions I would genuinely love to keep talking about:

What would it actually take for your organization to share a budget range by default, instead of treating it as a last resort?

How do you currently handle the awkward middle of a long RFP timeline, the stretch where nothing has changed but everyone is still waiting?

Where is AI already showing up in your process, honestly, and has anyone actually agreed on how much to trust it yet?

And maybe the biggest one: what does a great RFP partnership look like from where you sit, and how far is your current process from that?

Great communication is the foundation of a great RFP, and a great RFP is the foundation of a great partnership. That is not a groundbreaking realization, but apparently it needed four smart people, one moderator, and an hour of our time to say it out loud together. Consider this the start of that conversation, not the end of it. Reach out, argue with me, tell me I am wrong about the mattress thing. I would genuinely love to hear it.

We hope this panel sparked new ideas in the event professionals who attended and more of this conversation can lead to new practices for all of us. For now, thank you to everyone who tuned in, typed a question, or just sat with us for an hour thinking about something most people try very hard not to think about.