"There's an RFP Coming — Wait For It": How to Not Get Boxed Out of Your Own Deal

The sentence that quietly ends a lot of deals

You've had two good calls. The problem is real, the person you're talking to owns it, and they've said out loud that the current setup is costing them time. You ask about next steps and get this:

"There's an RFP coming. Keep an eye out for it and get your response in."

Most reps hear that and feel good. It sounds like progress. It sounds like a process, and processes sound like they end in purchase orders. So they say thanks, put a task in the CRM for six weeks out, and go work another account.

That rep has just been boxed out of their own deal and doesn't know it yet.

I've sat on both sides of this. Selling inside AWS and Dell you run into formal procurement constantly, and building and exiting four businesses means I've also been the buyer who said something like "we'll be running a process" to a vendor I had no intention of buying from. The sentence is doing work. Your job is to figure out what work.

Three things that could be true

When someone tells you to wait for the RFP, the sentence is covering one of three very different situations. They require completely different responses, and using the wrong one is how good deals die.

Someone else is writing it. A competitor got in front of this account months ago, ran a proper discovery process, and helped your buyer build the requirements list. The document that's coming is a description of that competitor's product with the logo taken off. You will be one of the three quotes procurement needs to prove they shopped around. This is the most common version and it's the one reps are least willing to believe, because believing it means the pipeline number they told their manager was fiction.

Nobody is writing it. There is no RFP. There is a person who doesn't want to say no to you, or who genuinely thinks they might do something about this next year, or who has been told by their boss to "look at options" and has interpreted that as "say the word RFP to vendors." This is a soft no wearing a suit. It's also, oddly, the most recoverable of the three, because nothing has been decided.

Procurement policy actually mandates it. Above a certain spend threshold, this organisation is legally or contractually obliged to compete the work. Your champion isn't stalling you. They may love you. They simply cannot hand you a contract without a competitive process, and if they try, someone in finance or legal will stop them. This is normal in public sector, utilities, universities, hospitals, and plenty of large enterprises with a strict delegation of authority.

One sentence, three worlds. So stop treating it as an objection to overcome and start treating it as a diagnosis to make.

The diagnostic questions

You need to ask these on the call, in the moment, before you hang up. Not in a follow-up email. Email gives people time to write the careful version of the answer, and the careful version tells you nothing.

The tone matters more than the words. You're not interrogating them. You're a supplier who wants to be useful in the process and is trying to work out how, and if you sound like that, most buyers will tell you a surprising amount.

"Who's pulling the requirements together?"

Start here. It's a logistics question, so it doesn't trigger defensiveness, and the answer is enormously revealing.

If the answer is a specific person with a specific job — "Sarah in ops is drafting it, then it goes to procurement" — the process is real and there's a named human you need to get in front of. If the answer is vague — "it'll come out of procurement" or "we're still working that out" — you're probably in case two. Nobody has started. There may be nothing to start.

If the answer is "we've had a consultant helping us scope it," write that down and slow down. A consultant scoping a requirements document is very often a consultant with a preferred vendor.

"What's already gone into it?"

This is the question that surfaces case one. Ask it plainly: has any of the requirements work already happened, and who have you spoken to so far?

A buyer who says "we've had a few vendors in to demo, that's helped us shape what we're asking for" has just told you that the spec is already tilted. That's not a reason to walk. It's a reason to find out which vendor did the shaping, because you now know exactly which product's feature list you'll be reading in the requirements.

The tell in the document itself is oddly specific requirements. Nobody writes "must support role-based access with a four-level hierarchy and delegated approvals at each level" from first principles. Somebody wrote it down while looking at a screen.

"What happens if the process doesn't produce a clear winner?"

Ask this one and listen to how fast the answer comes.

If they say "then we'd probably stay as we are" without pausing, you've learned the do-nothing option is live and the pain isn't as acute as you thought. If they say "that's not really an option, we have to have something in place by the summer," now you've got a compelling event and you should immediately ask what's driving that date. Contract expiry. Audit. A regulator. A system going end-of-life. Something is forcing it and that something is more useful to you than anything in the RFP document.

"Is this above a threshold, or a choice?"

This is the cleanest way to separate case three from the others, and buyers answer it honestly because it's about their rules, not their preferences.

"Is this going out to tender because the spend crosses a threshold, or because the team wants to compare options?" A mandated process has a number attached to it and the buyer will usually tell you the number or at least confirm there is one. A discretionary process is a choice, and choices can be influenced.

Getting on the call before the document exists

Here's the thing that separates people who win competitive processes from people who fill them in: the deal is decided during requirements gathering, not during evaluation. By the time the document is published, the shape of the answer is already set. Everything after that is paperwork.

So the objective, always, is to be in the room while the requirements are being written.

The way in is not "can I help you write the RFP." That sounds like exactly what it is, and any competent procurement officer will shut it down, correctly, because it compromises the fairness of the process. The way in is market engagement.

Most organisations that run formal processes have a legitimate mechanism for talking to suppliers beforehand. It's called supplier engagement, market sounding, pre-tender consultation, an RFI, or an industry day, depending on where you are. It exists precisely because buyers who write specifications with no market input end up asking for things that don't exist or paying for things they don't need. You are allowed to participate. Often they want you to.

The ask sounds like this:

"Before the requirements are locked, is there a market engagement stage? I'd rather tell you what's technically possible now than tell you in a bid response that it's not, when it's too late for you to change anything. Even thirty minutes with whoever's drafting."

That framing works because it's true and because it makes you useful. You're offering to reduce the chance that they publish a document nobody can answer well.

If there's no formal mechanism, ask for the drafter directly. "Would it be useful for me to spend twenty minutes with Sarah while she's scoping? Not a pitch — I'd want to walk her through the two or three things that usually get specified badly in this category and cost people money later." That's a genuine offer of expertise, and it's how you end up shaping requirements without ever asking to shape requirements.

What do you actually say in those twenty minutes? You educate, you don't sell. You explain the trade-offs in the category. You tell them which requirements are cheap to include and which ones will triple the price. You warn them about the things that look identical on a feature grid but aren't. Every one of those conversations, done honestly, leaves a fingerprint on the document. That's the whole point.

If you're trying to get that meeting in local government, the language for it is essentially the same language you'd use to book any officer-level conversation, and I've written out how I'd phrase the opening in the government and public sector cold call script. The framing is identical: you're not asking them to buy, you're asking for the time it takes to be useful.

Writing a response that doesn't read like everyone else's

Assume you've done the work and the document lands. Most responses are indistinguishable. Same compliance language, same boilerplate, same case studies with the client name swapped. Evaluators read them in a row on a Thursday afternoon and by the fourth one they've stopped reading properly.

Three things separate a response that gets read.

Answer the question that was asked, in the order it was asked. This sounds insultingly basic. It isn't. Most vendors treat the response as an opportunity to talk about what they want to talk about, and evaluators scoring against a rubric have to go hunting for the answer. Make it impossible to lose marks. If the question has four parts, answer four parts, in four paragraphs, labelled. Scoring is mechanical. Make the mechanics easy.

Show that you understood their situation specifically. Every response says "we understand your challenges." Almost none of them demonstrate it. If you did the pre-work, you know something concrete about this buyer — the contract expiring in March, the two systems that don't talk to each other, the audit finding from last year. Reference it, precisely, early. An evaluator reading a document that clearly describes their actual organisation will read the rest differently.

Say something true that the others won't. Name a limitation. Tell them what your product doesn't do well and what you'd recommend they do about it. Vendors are terrified of this and it's the single most credible thing you can put in a bid. When I've been the buyer, the response that admitted a gap was the one I trusted on everything else. Every other document was a sales brochure and I discounted all of it equally.

One more thing. If the document contains a requirement you're sure was written by a competitor, don't ignore it and don't complain about it. Answer it, then add a line explaining the alternative approach and what it costs or saves. You're planting a doubt in the evaluator's mind about whether the requirement should have been there. Sometimes that's enough.

Public sector and utilities: the vehicle beats the pitch

In government, healthcare, and regulated utilities, there's a layer above all of this that most commercial reps never learn, and it matters more than your demo.

The question isn't only "will they buy." It's "through what mechanism can they buy?" Framework agreements, purchasing consortia, panel arrangements, pre-approved supplier lists, call-off contracts. If you're on the right vehicle, a buyer can often award you work with a light-touch competition or sometimes a direct award. If you're not on it, you can have the best product in the category and be structurally unbuyable.

So when a council officer or a network operator tells you an RFP is coming, one of your diagnostic questions changes. Ask which route to market they're using. Ask whether they're going to open tender or calling off an existing framework. Ask which frameworks they typically buy through. If the answer is a framework you're not on, your deal this quarter isn't the deal — getting onto that vehicle is, and that's a longer, different piece of work you should be honest with your manager about.

The other thing about public sector is that the conversation before the tender is often the only conversation you get, and it's usually short and usually borrowed from somebody else's credibility — a reference from another authority, a colleague's introduction, a supplier day. I've written up how I'd spend those ninety seconds in the warm call script for public sector, because the difference between wasting that call and converting it is almost entirely about what you ask for at the end.

Utilities have their own version. Asset and network buyers work to regulatory price control periods and capital plans that are set years ahead, which means the real question is never "do you have budget" but "which period does this sit in and who owns that line." That's a discovery conversation with a specific shape to it, and the questions I'd use are in the energy and utilities discovery playbook. Get those answers and the tender timeline stops being a mystery.

When to no-bid, and how to do it well

Sometimes the honest read is that you can't win. The spec is wired, the incumbent has a relationship you can't dislodge in a paper process, and responding will cost you and your solutions team days of work for a scored loss.

No-bid. But do it in a way that pays you back.

The bad no-bid is silence. You just don't respond, and the buyer notes that you weren't serious. The good no-bid is a short, respectful note to the named contact that says you've reviewed the requirements, you don't think you're the right fit for what's specified, here's the one thing you'd flag as a risk in the approach, and you'd welcome a conversation when this comes round again or if the process doesn't land where they expect.

That note does three things. It positions you as a supplier with judgement rather than one who bids on everything. It leaves a specific, useful observation in their head. And it makes you the obvious first call when the winning vendor underdelivers, which happens more often than the industry likes to admit. I've picked up deals a year after a no-bid, from exactly that note.

What you must not do is no-bid and then complain about the fairness of the process. You'll be right and it won't help.

The habit underneath all of this

Every one of these moves depends on you asking a slightly uncomfortable question while you're still on the call. Who's writing it. What's already gone in. What happens if nobody wins. Is this a threshold or a choice. None of them are hard questions. They're just questions that feel rude in the moment, so reps skip them, say "great, I'll look out for it," and hang up.

The gap between knowing what to ask and asking it under mild social pressure is the whole game, and it doesn't close by reading. It closes by saying the words out loud enough times that they stop feeling confrontational. If I were tightening this up right now, I'd take the four diagnostic questions above into DrillCall and run them against a buyer who deflects to procurement, over and over, until asking "who's actually drafting it?" comes out as flat and unbothered as asking for someone's email address. That's the only version of it that works.

An RFP you find out about when it's published is a deal you already lost. An RFP you helped shape is a deal you're probably going to win. The difference is one conversation, and it happens before the document exists.