Although romanticized, rule-breaking is a fast track to nowhere—unless you know something the rule-makers don’t. And when it comes to requests for proposals in the business of expertise? That’s exactly our edge.
RFPs are how clients shop for vendors like they’re buying paper clips. They list requirements, set criteria, and hunt for the lowest price. Classic procurement thinking. Works perfectly—for commodities.
But here’s where it breaks down: Window cleaning? Sure, it’s done, or it isn’t—just compare the price. But try applying that to strategic consulting or custom coding. Expertise is a spectrum of mastery that can’t meaningfully be reduced to a single, easy-to-compare number.
Truth is, even clients lose when they use the all equally good, so the cheapest wins logic.
Don’t play their game. Instead, reply with a strategic clarification: Requirement X could mean A or B—and that completely changes the impact, value, and the price of the solution.
This creates a beautiful dilemma:
– Either the gatekeepers can’t answer (they rarely can) and you get direct access to the decision-maker
– Or they ghost you, saving you from wasting time on a doomed proposal
The best part? If you get that conversation, you can prove why their RFP process fails them—positioning yourself as the expert who caught what everyone else missed. Now that’s a much better start of a real conversation.