How Marketing Agencies Can Procure Print for Clients Faster With a Single RFQ

Your account manager just promised the client artwork-to-delivery in ten working days, and you still don't have a printer confirmed. Sound familiar? For most marketing agencies, print procurement is the invisible bottleneck that eats into margin and burns junior time on phone calls that should never have been needed.

Why print sourcing quietly kills agency margin

Agencies aren't print buyers by trade. You're pitching, planning, designing, and shipping campaigns — and somewhere in that chain a project manager ends up ringing four printers to price a run of 5,000 A5 flyers on 300gsm silk with a spot UV finish. By the time three of them reply, the deadline has shrunk and the client is already asking for a proof.

The usual pattern looks like this:

• A creative team finalises a spec late in the week.
• An account manager forwards it to "their" printer for a price.
• The quote comes back higher than expected, or the printer can't do the finishing in-house.
• Someone starts phoning around for alternatives, chasing callbacks between meetings.
• The client is quoted a figure that already has too little margin baked in — because there was no time to shop it properly.

Multiply that across ten live campaigns and it's easy to see why print procurement, done ad-hoc, quietly erodes profitability and slows delivery.

The case for a single, well-written RFQ

A Request for Quote isn't a heavy corporate procurement document — it's just a clear brief that lets multiple printers price the same job on the same terms. Post it once, and instead of hunting suppliers one at a time, the suppliers come to you.

For an agency, that flips the workflow. You stop being a caller and start being a chooser.

What a good agency RFQ actually contains

The printers who respond well are the ones who got enough detail to price confidently. A solid agency RFQ typically includes:

1. Product and quantity — e.g. 5,000 A5 flyers, 2,000 saddle-stitched 16pp brochures.
2. Stock and weight — 300gsm silk, 170gsm uncoated, recycled if the client cares.
3. Colour — CMYK throughout, or CMYK + one Pantone spot, plus any bleed notes.
4. Finishing — matt lam, spot UV, foiling, die-cut, folding, perfect bound.
5. Delivery — single address, split delivery, pallet vs boxed, deadline.
6. Artwork status — print-ready PDF, needs pre-flight, or design still in progress.

Get those six lines right and you'll cut most of the "quick question" emails that normally add 48 hours to a sourcing cycle.

Turning one RFQ into five comparable quotes

This is where a marketplace changes the maths. On ZeozGig, an agency posts a single RFQ for £1 and it goes out to printers who actually run the kit for that job — litho houses for long-run brochures, digital presses for short-run variable data, wide-format for exhibition graphics, trade finishers for the foiling and die-cutting.

Instead of one price to react to, you get several to compare. You can see who's cheapest, who's fastest, and who's clearly best set up for a specific finish. And if — for whatever reason — nobody responds, the RFQ fee is refunded automatically. There's no penalty for testing whether the market wants your job.

Where agencies typically save the most time

• Unusual specs. Pantone matches, unusual stocks, oversized formats — the specialists find you instead of the other way round.
• Overflow weeks. When your usual printer is booked, one RFQ surfaces capacity you didn't know existed.
• Local delivery. Filtering by region means the pallet doesn't have to travel 200 miles to a client's launch event.
• New client verticals. A packaging job or garment run doesn't need a fresh round of cold calls — just a new RFQ.

Protecting client margin without the middleman tax

The other quiet drain on agency print work is the commission stacked into web-to-print aggregators and reseller platforms. Every percentage point taken off the top is a percentage point you either eat or pass to the client.

ZeozGig's model is deliberately different: fixed per-action fees rather than a slice of every deal. Posting an RFQ costs £1. Listing a service costs £1. Opening a direct connection with a printer — full chat, voice or video — is a one-off £5. Voice calls are 50p, video calls £1. That's it. No commission on the print itself, no monthly subscription, no contract.

For an agency, this matters in two ways. First, whatever mark-up you negotiate with the printer stays yours in full. Second, once you've connected with a supplier you like, they're yours — you can go back to them directly for repeat work without paying a platform tax on every job.

Fitting RFQs into how agencies already work

You don't need to rebuild your procurement process to benefit from this. Most agencies drop the RFQ step in at one of two moments:

• At estimate stage, before the client sees a figure — so the number you quote is grounded in real supplier prices, not a guess.
• At production stage, once artwork is signed off — to lock in the best price and turnaround from suppliers who confirmed availability that week.

Both save time. The first protects margin; the second protects the deadline.

Post the RFQ, keep the margin

If your next print job is already on the schedule, try running it through a single RFQ instead of the usual phone tree. Post the brief on ZeozGig, let capable printers and finishers quote against each other, and connect directly with the one that fits — no commission, no contracts, and the full margin still yours. Post your first RFQ and see how much of a Tuesday afternoon you get back.