The tender was written for someone

Consider a vendor with the stronger product, the better demo and the lower price, which comes second in a tender and cannot say why. The feedback letter lists scores, the scores are close, and the contract goes to the vendor that was already there.

This happens often enough that it should shape how a buyer reads any SaaS pipeline. It is rarely about anyone breaking a rule.

Most decisions are made before the vendor is in the room

6sense’s 2025 Buyer Experience Report, drawn from nearly 4,000 B2B buyers across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, found that 94% of buying groups had ranked their preferred vendors before first contact with any of them, and that the favorite at that point went on to win about 80% of the time. The average buying cycle in the same study ran 10.1 months, with around 5 vendors evaluated.

Read that from the vendor’s side. For most of the cycle, most of the vendors on the shortlist are not competing for a decision. They are the comparison that makes the decision defensible.

This is not irrational. For the person signing, a vendor they already know is the lower personal risk, and in a buying group of many people, the option someone has already vouched for is the one least likely to be blocked.

How a requirement document takes a side

A formal request for proposal looks neutral, and most of the people who write one believe it is. But requirements come from somewhere: from the system the team already uses, from the vendor who ran a free workshop last spring, from the consultant who has implemented one platform many times, and from the questions a preferred vendor suggested asking.

The result can be a document in which every requirement is reasonable and the sum of them describes one product. A certification only one vendor holds. An integration with the system the incumbent already sold. References required from clients of the same size, in the same country. A timeline only a vendor already inside the account can meet. A heavy weighting on “understanding of our environment”. None of it is improper on its own. It is what familiarity looks like once it is written down.

Public procurement is where this gets measured. The European Court of Auditors’ special report 28/2023 found that the share of EU public procurement procedures receiving a single bid rose from 23.5% in 2011 to 41.8% in 2021, while the average number of bidders per procedure fell from 5.7 to 3.2. A single bid is not proof that a tender was tilted. It does show how often a vendor enters a process that, in practice, has already narrowed.

Geography changes the contest

What counts as a normal buying relationship differs by market. In some, software is expected to arrive through a local integrator the buyer already trusts, and a direct approach reads as presumption. In others, the conversation that matters happens in an industry association, a sector working group or an introduction from a former colleague, long before any document is published. A local entity, local-language support and local references all score, some formally and some not. A company that wins on product at home can find that abroad, the product was never the contest being held.

Influence over standards is part of the same picture. Vendors that sit on the working groups defining a sector’s specification, or that help a regulator understand a new category, are doing nothing wrong. They are present when the terms are set, and a competitor who arrives at the tender stage is playing on a pitch that has already been marked.

What this means for a buyer of the company

A pipeline made of tenders the company did not see coming is weaker than it looks, whatever the quality of the product. The questions that tell the difference are practical.

Of the deals won, which ones did the company shape before the process became formal: an existing relationship, a workshop, a pilot, a requirement it helped define. Of the deals lost, which were lost to an incumbent, and what the feedback actually said.

Win rate on formal processes the company entered late, against win rate where it was involved early. A gap is normal. A company with no early involvement anywhere is selling on product alone, and product alone mostly comes second.

Who holds the relationships. Where the accounts that matter trust one executive or one partner, that trust is an asset and a dependency at once, and it may not transfer with the sale.

And the view from the other side of the table. A conversation with a lost prospect, held by someone who is not the vendor, often gives the answer the feedback letter was written not to give: the decision was made earlier, between people who already knew each other.