Note on confidentiality
The case below is anonymised and slightly composited. The mechanism is real. No confidential data, names, or internal documents are disclosed.
I recall a tender cycle in a mature industrial category. Multi-site consumption. High operational dependency. The buyer wanted “fair comparison” and “clean governance”.
The supplier teams heard a different message: “This is a price contest. Bring your best number.”
It looked that way. The scorecard showed a familiar split: technical and commercial, with price heavily weighted.
Not by corruption. By architecture.
Months earlier, the operational stakeholders had translated vague needs into specific requirements. A few of those requirements were written as gates, not preferences. They were framed as “mandatory for continuity” and “non-negotiable for risk”. Perfectly defensible on paper. Invisible until it was too late.
When challengers proposed a different operating model that delivered the same outcome at lower total cost, they received the line that ends many tenders: “The criteria are fixed. Bid compliant.”
Most sales leaders interpret that as arrogance. Or bureaucracy. Or Procurement power.
It is simpler than that. It is an administrative lock. A frozen evaluation machine.
And once it freezes, your negotiation skill becomes secondary. You can be brilliant at the table and still lose, because you are arguing inside a scoring system that cannot be reopened without the buyer paying a political and process cost.
It is non-negotiable only because you arrived after it hardened.
Diagnosis: Criteria Calcification
This is not a negotiation skill problem. This is an upstream control gap. I call it Criteria Calcification.
Evaluation logic hardens through four forces:
- Anchoring: stakeholders copy last cycle requirements because it feels safe.
- Simplification: nuance is converted into binary fields to make scoring manageable.
- Governance: Procurement formalises the model to protect fairness and comparability.
- Process cost: once released, changing criteria means re-alignment, re-issue, delay, and internal risk.
So “fixed” does not mean correct. It means costly to reopen. Procurement is not protecting the criteria because it is perfect. Procurement is protecting the process because the process is auditable.
If you first engage at RFP release, you are negotiating inside a frozen measurement system.
Mechanism: How evaluation logic becomes non-negotiable
Before the RFP exists, the business has a problem but lacks language to describe the solution. Whoever is present fills the vacuum.
This is where “ghost requirements” are planted. They sound reasonable, but they lean on one supplier’s footprint, operating model, or legacy constraints.
Stakeholders define “quality” as “what we get today.”
Innovation becomes deviation. Deviation becomes risk. Risk becomes exclusion. A superior alternative can be rejected simply because it does not resemble the status quo.
Procurement needs comparability. So the scorecard becomes a set of yes or no questions:
- certificates
- minimum thresholds
- compliance gates
- mandatory service constructs
If your differentiation does not fit a checkbox, it earns no points. No points means free value. Free value means margin pressure.
The tender is issued. Now every change has a governance cost:
- re-align stakeholders
- re-issue to all bidders
- extend timelines
- explain deviation internally
When you ask to change criteria now, you are asking the buyer to pay a visible process price for an uncertain benefit. So the safest answer is: “fixed”.
Surgery: The Intervention
You do not argue inside the frozen scorecard. You install one control that prevents your team from pricing blind and forces earlier leverage.
The Criteria Source Map does three things:
- identifies which criteria are gates disguised as weights
- reveals who authored each requirement
- separates true locks from assumptions
It turns “fixed” into a diagnosable condition, not a dead end.
Tool to Install: The Criteria Source Map
Stop rule: Do not issue a final commercial offer until every gate criterion has a known author and a status. Use this on the top 10 criteria in any strategic tender.
| Criterion Example | Type | Source | Status | What it protects | Your move |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local inventory requirement | Gate | Operations | Unknown | Continuity | Clarify source and rationale before pricing |
| Response time threshold | Gate | Ops + Quality | Influenceable | Uptime risk | Propose equivalent mechanism with measurement |
| Price or TCO | Weight | Procurement | Locked | Comparability | Protect boundaries, trade not concede |
| Reporting or audit burden | Gate | Compliance | Locked | Governance | Quantify cost to serve, price it explicitly |
Status key:
- Locked: do not waste cycles trying to rewrite it, design around it or walk away
- Influenceable: can be shaped by outcome and risk logic, routed via official channel
- Unknown: you are blind, do not final-price
Two questions to ask every time:
- Which line item is a gate pretending to be a preference
- Which “must-have” forces cost to serve without compensation
Discharge Checklist
Execute this week:
This week, refuse to price blind. If a gate criterion is unknown, the correct move is not discounting. The correct move is diagnosis.
Call to Action
If your team keeps hearing “the criteria are fixed,” you are arriving after the evaluation machine has frozen.
Stop the Bleeding. Request a Diagnostic Session.
Bring one RFP or one tender loss. We will locate where the criteria calcified, identify the gatekeepers, and install the upstream control that prevents margin compression next cycle.
