Column Fodder: How RFPs Became Free Consulting for Buying Teams

There's a term sellers use for it now: column fodder.

It means your proposal was never in the running. The buying team had already picked their vendor, often the incumbent, often the one who helped write the RFP in the first place. Your job was to fill the second and third columns of the comparison spreadsheet so procurement could tick the "fair process" box. You were invited so the process would look objective. The decision was made before the document reached your inbox.

Ask around and you'll find the same rule of thumb repeated across sales forums and LinkedIn alike: if the first time you hear about an RFP is when it lands, you probably weren't meant to win it.

The most expensive document in sales Look at what a serious RFP response actually costs. Solution design. Pricing architecture. Implementation planning. Competitive positioning. Security documentation. Reference coordination. Days or weeks of work from your most senior people, produced to a deadline the buyer set, in a format the buyer chose.

Now look at what the buying team receives, whether or not you ever had a chance: a detailed, professionally assembled blueprint of how you would solve their problem, what it would cost, and how you think about their business.

When the deal was real, that's the price of competing. When you were column fodder, that's free consulting. The buying team collected three or four expert solution designs, used them to pressure-test the vendor they'd already chosen, squeezed the incumbent's margins with your pricing, and paid nothing for any of it.

Why nobody calls it what it is Here's the uncomfortable part. This behaviour has no consequences.

A vendor that fumbles a deal gets a bad G2 review and loses the next one. A buying team that runs three vendors through a sham process loses nothing. There's no public record that they did it. The next set of vendors walks into the next RFP exactly as blind as the last set, invests the same weeks of senior time, and gets used the same way.

The sellers know. Individually, every experienced AE carries a private blacklist of accounts that ran them through theatre. But that knowledge is trapped. It lives in one rep's memory, maybe in a war story told over drinks, never anywhere the next seller could check before committing their own quarter to the same account.

The signals, before you invest The pattern is detectable if you know what to look for before the response goes in:

You've never spoken to anyone there. The RFP arrived cold, with no prior conversation and no access to stakeholders during the process. Real evaluations involve dialogue. Theatre doesn't need it. The requirements read like someone else's product. When the specification maps suspiciously well to one competitor's feature list, that competitor probably helped write it. Questions get funnelled and answers get flattened. Every clarifying question goes through a portal, answers are shared with all bidders, and any attempt to understand the actual problem is treated as breaking protocol. That structure exists to keep the process defensible, not to find the best solution. The timeline is rigid but the decision criteria are vague. Hard deadlines for your work, soft language about how it will be judged. That asymmetry tells you whose time the process was designed to protect. Any one of these can be innocent. All four together are a decided outcome wearing a fair process as a costume.

What changes when the process gets a memory Sellers have started pushing back individually. Some now qualify RFPs as hard as they qualify deals, and simply decline the ones that smell like theatre. That protects one team's quarter. It does nothing for the next vendor on the list, and it does nothing to change the buying team's behaviour, because the behaviour still carries no cost.

What changes the economics is a record. When a verified seller who went through an account's RFP process can leave an honest account of it, whether the process was genuine, whether stakeholders were accessible, whether the outcome suggested a predetermined winner, the next seller gets to make an informed bid/no-bid decision before spending weeks of senior time. And buying teams that run honest processes get something they've never had either: a way to show sellers, in advance, that their evaluation is worth competing in.

That's the layer Dealecho adds. Reviews of buying teams, written by verified sales executives who have actually sold to them, available before you commit. Not to punish buyers, but to let the fair ones stand out and make the theatre visible.

RFPs aren't going away, and they shouldn't. A genuine competitive evaluation is good for everyone. What should go away is the version where your best work is harvested by a team that never intended to buy it, and nobody ever finds out.