"It Has to Go Out to Tender" — Working an RFP-First Buyer Without Becoming Column Fodder

Somewhere around the third call, the buyer says it. "This is great, but anything at this level has to go out to tender."

Most reps hear that as a delay. They write "procurement Q3" in the CRM, set a task, and move on feeling good about the conversation. What actually happened is that the deal either just became a lottery ticket or it was never yours in the first place, and the buyer has told you which one if you know how to ask.

Here is the thing nobody says out loud in sales training. An RFP you did not help write is a form you fill in so that somebody else can win. Not always. But often enough that you should treat an unsourced tender document the way you treat an inbound lead with a Gmail address and no company name — possible, worth thirty seconds, not worth thirty hours.

The phrase for what you become is column fodder. Procurement needs three bids to satisfy the rules. The incumbent is bid one. Somebody's preferred challenger is bid two. You are the third column on the scoring spreadsheet, and your job in the process is to exist so the award is defensible. You will get a polite rejection and a scoring breakdown that shows you were competitive on price and lost on "demonstrated experience in comparable environments," which is a phrase that means the winner wrote that criterion.

So the question is not "how do I write a better bid." The question is "which of the three kinds of tender is this," and you answer it with questions on a call, before you commit a single hour of bid-writing time.

The three kinds of tender

One: a genuinely open competitive process

The requirement is new. Nobody currently supplies it. The officer writing the specification has read a couple of vendor websites and is honestly unsure what good looks like. There may be an incumbent for something adjacent, but not for this.

This is the one worth fighting for, and it is also the one where early influence pays the most, because the specification is genuinely undecided. If you get to this buyer before the document exists, you are not cheating. You are doing the thing the procurement rules generally expect suppliers to do, which is help the buyer understand the market.

Two: a compliance formality where the incumbent has already won

The requirement is a renewal wearing a costume. The current supplier has been in place for years, the officer likes them, the specification is going to be written from the current supplier's feature set, and the tender exists because the contract term expired and the rules say you have to re-compete it.

You can spot this one. The requirements read like a product datasheet. There are line items that only one vendor in the market satisfies. The timeline is short — two or three weeks to respond on something that would take a competent team a quarter to scope. Short timelines are the single loudest tell, because a buyer who wants a real market response gives the market time to respond, and a buyer who needs a paper trail does not.

You do not bid these. Or if you bid them, you bid them cheap in effort and honest in intent, and you use the process to get in front of the people who will run the next one.

Three: a threshold rule you can legitimately work under

Most public bodies and a lot of large enterprises have a spend threshold. Under the threshold, an officer can buy directly or with a couple of quotes. Over it, full tender. There are usually intermediate bands too — under X, one quote; between X and Y, three written quotes; above Y, open procurement.

This is the most under-exploited fact in public sector selling. "It has to go to tender" is very often shorthand for "the way I have scoped it, it has to go to tender." A pilot, a single department, a twelve-month term instead of thirty-six, a phase one — these are not tricks. They are how a buyer with a real problem and no appetite for a nine-month procurement gets started. Your job is to ask what the threshold is and then help them design something honest that sits under it, with the full-scale procurement as the planned second act.

The three questions that tell you which one you are in

You can sort a tender into those buckets with three questions. Ask them on a call, conversationally, without sounding like you are auditing the process.

"Who's writing the requirements, and how far along are they?"

The answer tells you almost everything. "We haven't started, we're scoping it in the new year" is a gift. "It's with legal for final review" means the game is over and you were not playing. "Our current supplier helped us put the technical annex together" is an answer you will get more often than you would expect, because to the officer it is completely unremarkable — of course they asked the people who currently do the work.

Ask it warmly. "Just so I know where we are — is the spec written yet, or is that still being pulled together?"

"What have the last three awards in this category looked like?"

This is the one nobody asks, and in the public sector the answer is frequently a matter of public record anyway, so you can look it up before the call and ask a sharper version of it. If the same supplier has won the last three, you are not in a competition, you are in a ritual. If the awards move around, there is a real market here.

The phrasing matters. Not "do you always buy from the same people," which sounds like an accusation. Try: "When you've run this before, how did it go? Who tends to end up on the shortlist?" Officers will tell you. They are not hiding it. They think it is boring background.

"What's the threshold, and where does this land against it?"

Ask it flatly. "What's the value where this stops being something you can just do and starts being a formal process?" Then: "And where does this sit against that?" If the answer is that the project is somewhat over the line, there is a conversation to be had about scope. If it is far over, there is not, and you should stop pretending there is.

Those three questions take four minutes. Almost every rep I have watched skips all three and goes straight to asking when the document drops.

Getting in before the document exists

The uncomfortable truth about tenders is that the deal is usually decided in the months before the tender is published, in conversations that are entirely permitted and that hardly anyone bothers to have.

Public bodies typically allow — often actively want — pre-market engagement. Supplier days, market soundings, prior information notices, informal calls with officers scoping a project. The rules exist to stop you bribing the evaluator, not to stop you explaining what the technology can do. Once the tender is live, the shutters come down and everything has to go through a formal clarification portal where your question and its answer are published to every other bidder. Before it goes live, you can just talk to people.

So the entire game is being known and trusted by the officer who drafts the requirement, in the window before drafting starts.

That means your outbound to the public sector should not be timed to procurement portals. It should be timed to budget cycles and to the point where a problem is being scoped. When someone in a council or a health body or a utility is at the stage of "we know this is broken and we're trying to work out what to do about it," that is your moment, and there is no notice published anywhere to tell you it has arrived. You find it by calling.

Which brings us to what you actually say.

What to say to a council officer on the first call

The goal of this call is not a demo. It is not a discovery meeting in your format. It is twenty minutes on their calendar in which you help them scope a problem they already have, before anyone writes anything down.

The opener I would use runs close to this:

"Morning, it's Tim from [company]. I'll be quick and you can tell me if this isn't you. We work with [category of body] on [specific problem in their language, not yours]. I'm not calling about a live procurement — I know how that works and I'm not going to try to sell you anything mid-process. I'm calling because most of the useful conversations happen before anything goes to market, and I'd rather be useful now than turn up as a name on a bid list later. Are you the person scoping that, or is it someone else's patch?"

Three things are doing work there. First, you have named the procurement constraint before they had to, which immediately marks you as someone who has done this before and is not going to embarrass them. Second, you have explicitly disclaimed the thing they are worried about, which is that talking to a supplier will compromise a process. Third, you have asked a routing question rather than a permission question, so the natural answer is a name rather than a no.

The follow-up when they say yes, that is roughly me:

"Then here's what I'd suggest. Twenty minutes, no slides, and I'll tell you what the market can and can't actually do for this — including where our own product is a bad fit, because that's usually the more useful half. If it turns into something, it turns into something. If you end up writing a spec off the back of it and we don't win, that's a fair outcome."

That last sentence sounds like you are giving something away. You are not. You have just told a risk-averse public servant that you are safe to talk to, and you have earned the right to be in the room when the requirement takes shape. I have written out the full version of this in the government and public sector cold call script, including how to get past the switchboard and what to do when the officer says the budget was pulled.

If you have any kind of referral into the organisation — a neighbouring authority, a shared services arrangement, someone on a framework you both sit on — the call changes shape entirely and you should be spending that credibility deliberately rather than burning it on pleasantries, which is the whole point of the warm call script for public sector.

Saying no out loud

Here is the move almost nobody makes. When you have worked out that a tender is a formality, tell them.

Not bitterly. Not with an accusation. Something like:

"I've read the spec and I want to be straight with you rather than waste your evaluators' time. Sections four and six describe how one specific supplier is already set up, and we'd be scoring badly against criteria that aren't really about the outcome you want. So we're going to no-bid this one. What I would like is fifteen minutes after the award, whoever wins, to talk about how the next one gets scoped — because I think there's a version of this requirement that gets you more and costs less, and it needs to be written differently."

What happens next is interesting. Sometimes nothing. Sometimes the officer, who is frequently not thrilled about being locked to an incumbent either, says "which sections?" and now you are having a conversation about the requirement rather than filling in a form. Occasionally the tender gets amended or re-issued. I would not bank on that. But you have cost yourself nothing and you have made yourself the supplier who told the truth, and public sector buying communities are small and gossipy in a way that works in your favour over a couple of years.

The alternative — bidding anyway, losing, and disappearing — buys you nothing at all. You spent forty hours to be a scoring row.

No-bidding also protects something more valuable than any single deal, which is your team's belief in the pipeline. Nothing rots a public sector patch faster than a forecast stuffed with tenders that were decided before anyone opened the portal.

Make the tender the follow-on, not the first date

The reframe that changes how you work this whole motion: a tender should be the paperwork that formalises a relationship you already have, not the mechanism by which the relationship starts.

Everything upstream serves that. You want to be the supplier the officer thought of while writing the problem statement. You want at least one criterion in the document to exist because you explained why it mattered. You want the evaluators to have met you. You want a small paid pilot under threshold, delivered well, so that when the big procurement runs, "demonstrated experience in comparable environments" describes you.

And when you do get to the end of a real competitive process and win on merit, hold your price. Procurement will come back for a discount after the technical decision has already gone your way, because that is their job, and the leverage in that moment is far more balanced than it feels. The mechanics of that are the same in any regulated buyer — the way you hold your number after the technical win in an energy or utilities deal transfers almost directly to a council or a trust. The one rule is that a concession made before the award is a gift, and a concession made after the award should buy you something: term, references, a case study, a named expansion.

What I would do next

Pick your five biggest open opportunities where somebody has said the word tender. For each one, write down the answers to the three questions — who is drafting and how far along, what the last three awards looked like, and where the value sits against the threshold. If you cannot answer all three, you do not have a forecast, you have a hope, and you need to get back on the phone this week to find out.

Then practise the pre-market opener until it stops sounding like a script, because the first thirty seconds with a council officer is where this whole motion lives or dies. That is exactly the kind of call I built DrillCall for — reps run the government pre-market call against a buyer who is cautious about procurement rules, who pushes back with "I can't talk to suppliers about this," and who does not warm up just because you sound friendly. You want to have had that conversation fifty times before you have it with the officer who is about to write your next specification.