Why Competing Against Incumbents Drains Your BD Resources There is a particular frustration familiar to most BD managers and bid writers: the moment you realise, usually mid-bid, that the contract you have spent weeks pursuing was never really open. The buyer knows the current supplier. The specification reads like it was written with the supplier in the room. The evaluation weighting sits oddly on criteria that can only be met by someone already embedded in the account. You submit. You lose. This is not a failure of your bid. It is a failure of pipeline selection. Competing harder against entrenched…
