Christina Carter from Stargazy recently sat down with Stotles CEO, John Witt, on the Stargazy podcast. They talked about why the real work of winning a bid happens before the RFP exists. Christina shares on thoughts below. Most teams treat the response document as the main event. After years watching the best enterprise sellers and a career writing proposals, she can tell you the deal is usually decided long before the tender lands.
By Christina Carter, co-founder of stargazy
The best deal I ever saw win started with a no-bid.
A large public sector RFP went live, and it was the kind of logo and revenue teams stay up late for. The lead seller read it once, had a call with their procurement contact, and walked away from the opportunity. Her reasoning the buyer did not yet know what they really wanted.
I think about that deal a lot, because it captures something I keep having to convince proposal and bid teams of. The response document is, often, not where you win. By the time you are writing, the outcome is mostly already set. The teams who win consistently do their decisive work in the months before the RFP exists, and they treat the draft as the last step, not the main event.
I recently sat down with John Witt, co-founder and CEO of Stotles, for the stargazy podcast, and he put the same idea in a line: The winners use data to get leverage. The losers use data to do research.
We came at it from completely different directions, him from the procurement data side, me from years of writing proposals and watching enterprise sellers work, and landed in exactly the same place. So I want to lay out what that means in practice, before the RFP ever exists.
The single biggest mistake I see proposal teams make is waiting for the RFP to arrive before they engage. By the time the document goes public, you're going to have a tough time making any needed changes or getting to know the right stakeholders. If a competitor has been having shaping conversations with the buyer for months, the evaluation criteria already lean their way, and the technical requirements map to their product. You are not entering a fair fight.
John frames the upstream work as a capture motion that should be running twelve to eighteen months ahead of a tender going live. The winners, he says, are not hunting and pecking around Google when the notice appears. They have already organised their team around the right opportunities, because they spotted demand early. What lets them do that is a category of information he calls document intent data, which is the unstructured, awkward sources that sit outside formal procurement, like council meeting minutes, NHS trust strategy documents, annual reports, and freedom of information responses. These are ugly to process and rarely standardised, which is exactly why they are valuable. They show you what a buyer is worried about long before that worry becomes a requirement.
I call the same instinct influencing the RFP, and it is the most underused stage of the entire process. Long before any document exists, the best sellers I worked alongside would call a prospect and ask three deceptively simple things: 1. what are you trying to solve,
Then they would map those answers into the language the eventual RFP would use. They were building trust and getting to truly understand the stakeholders whilst their competitors were waiting.
The point where John's data and my process meet is how the shaping conversation is far more powerful when you walk into it already knowing what is keeping the buyer up at night. Document intent data is how you arrive informed rather than fishing. You are not asking the buyer to educate you, which is a huge no-no when working with execs anyways. Instead, you're showing them you already understand their problem.
Here is the part that feels counterintuitive until you have watched it work. The deals you do not bid are the ones that let you win the next one.
The best sellers I ever sat next to no-bid more opportunities than any team I have seen, and they also closed more revenue than any team I have seen. That is not a coincidence. They ran a fast, ruthless qualification on every inbound RFP, and when it failed, they sent a polite paragraph and stayed close to the buyer outside the procurement track. Then they waited for the rescope. A clean no-bid earns you a phone call when the buyer is ready. Bidding on everything earns you a last-place finish. And you're immediately forgotten by everyone at your buyer.
John makes the same argument in language any revenue leader recognises. You would never keep a sales rep who closed at five percent. So why let opportunities through your bid funnel that have a five percent chance of winning? His point is that the bidding motion is a sales funnel, and it deserves the same qualification discipline you already apply to deals, whether that is a framework like BANT or MEDDPICC or your own version. The reason teams do not is emotional. Saying no feels unprofessional, and there is always an executive somewhere who wants the logo. But bidding on bad opportunities to keep someone happy is one of the fastest routes to a burned-out team and a falling win rate.
I treat qualification as a real gate with named criteria, and two of them matter enormously before the RFP. Is the budget real, or is this a benchmarking exercise the buyer will ghost everyone on? And can legal work out an agreement on the buyer's terms, or is there a hard no buried in the contract that no amount of brilliant writing will fix? The mistake is treating those as things you will work out later. If they are a no, you're just kicking the no down the road when you're forced to make that decision.
John adds a structural point I want to underline, because it changes how the gate should work. Qualification should not be one person's decision made alone under deadline pressure. It should be what he calls multiplayer. Put the signals in front of several people, let them pressure-test the pursuit together, and you make a faster and better call than any lone bid manager guessing. The data does the legwork of surfacing the snakes in the grass. The team makes the judgement.
Most public sector pursuits are decided by incumbency, and pretending otherwise wastes weeks. John cites figures from the Stotles supplier benchmarking survey: over half of respondents generate around 60% of their revenue from existing accounts, and there is roughly a sixty percent chance an incumbent holds onto a renewable contract. Those odds are knowable in advance, which means bidding blind against a wired incumbent is a choice, not bad luck.
So read the incumbent before you commit a single hour of writing. John named a few signals worth checking.
This connects to something I learned watching sellers handle evaluation criteria. The eval document is the buyer complaining in formal language. When a brief insists a vendor must integrate with an existing system within ninety days, the real message is that the last vendor's integration took fourteen months and someone senior is still furious about it. Reading those signals before you decide to bid tells you whether the incumbent is beatable, and exactly which pain your pursuit needs to speak to if you go ahead.
The thread running through all of this is context, gathered early and kept ready. John's closing line in our conversation was that data without action is worthless, or as he put it, data without action is hallucination. Having the information is not the advantage. Turning it into a decision early enough to matter is.
If you take one thing from this, let it be the proposal is not the main work but the receipt for work you should have done months earlier. Move your effort upstream, into capture and qualification, and the win rate follows. Leave it where most teams leave it, in a frantic three-week sprint after you receive the RFP, and no amount of polish, and no AI drafting tool, will save a pursuit that was lost before you opened the template.
The buyer decided long before the RFP existed. The only question is whether you were in the room while they were deciding.
You can hear the full conversation with John Witt on the stargazy podcast, and join the conversation in the stargazy community.
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Christina Godfrey Carter
Co-founder, Stargazy
Christina Carter is the co-founder of Stargazy, an independent analyst publication covering proposal win intelligence. She spent years inside enterprise sales, and her work now spans RFP strategy, bid process design, bid writing, and team training. Drawing on buyer behaviour research across GovCon, UK public sector, and enterprise B2B, she gives teams earlier insight into how proposals are actually judged.
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