Every founder eventually has the same experience. You win the room. The people who will actually use the thing are enthusiastic, the demo went well, the problem is real and you clearly solve it.
Then the process starts, and nine months later a competitor you consider inferior has the contract.
The usual explanation is that the buyer was incompetent or the incumbent had relationships. Sometimes true. Mostly it is neither. Procurement selected exactly what it was designed to select, and it was never designed to select the best product.
Understanding what it is actually for is the difference between raging at it and winning inside it.
What procurement optimises for
A formal purchasing process exists to manage risk and to be defensible. Not to maximise value. Those goals overlap sometimes, and diverge often.
Defensibility is the key idea. Someone in that organisation must be able to explain, months or years later, possibly to an auditor, why this supplier was chosen. That explanation has to survive scrutiny by people who were not there and do not understand the domain.
Which means the decision must be reducible to criteria that can be written down and scored. Anything that cannot be reduced to a scoreable criterion effectively does not exist in the process, however important it is.
This single constraint explains most of what looks irrational from the outside.
Your product is more pleasant to use? Not scoreable, so it counts for little. Your support is genuinely better? Everyone claims that, so it collapses into a checkbox that all bidders tick. Your architecture will age better over five years? Requires judgement to evaluate, therefore risky to defend, therefore quietly discounted.
Meanwhile things that are trivially scoreable dominate. Years in business. Number of employees. Certifications held. Reference customers of a certain size. Whether a feature exists as a yes or no, regardless of whether it works well.
None of that is stupidity. It is a system built to produce defensible decisions, faithfully producing defensible decisions.
The three ways good products lose
They arrive after the requirements are written.
This is the big one and it is nearly fatal. By the time a formal document reaches you, the criteria are fixed, and they were shaped by conversations you were not part of, frequently with a supplier who was. If your differentiator is not in the criteria, you cannot score for it. You are being measured on someone else's definition of the problem.
The implication is uncomfortable for anyone who prefers building to selling: the decisive work happens months before the process is visible, in conversations that do not look like sales at all.
They optimise for the user and ignore the risk owner.
Enthusiastic users do not carry the decision. The person who carries it is whoever will be blamed if it fails, and that person is optimising to not be blamed. Their questions are about what happens when things go wrong, not about how good it is when things go right.
If your entire pitch is upside, you have given that person nothing to hold. Give them the failure modes, the exit path, the reference who will speak candidly. Make it safe to choose you.
They win the pilot and lose the standard.
A successful pilot proves your product works. It does not answer the question the organisation actually has, which is whether this can be supported, renewed, audited, and lived with by people who did not choose it. Teams celebrate the pilot and then lose on questions they never thought about, because they treated the pilot as the finish line rather than the qualifying round.
What actually works
I have sold in enough contexts to be sceptical of anyone with a system for this. But a few things reliably help.
Be present before the requirements exist. Not pitching. Being useful. If you help shape how an organisation understands its problem, the eventual criteria will reflect that understanding. This is slow and it does not fit a quarterly pipeline, which is exactly why it works, because most competitors will not do it.
Write the section they cannot write. Buying teams are often required to specify things they do not fully understand. A supplier who hands them clear, honest, vendor neutral language for a technical requirement is doing them a genuine favour, and that language tends to survive into the final document.
Make the risk answer easy. Whoever owns the risk needs one page they can forward. What happens if you go out of business. Where the data lives and how it comes back. Who is accountable when it breaks. Have that ready before it is requested.
Ask what the last supplier got wrong. The most informative question available, and almost nobody asks it. Every unusual clause in a procurement document is a scar. Understanding the injury tells you what the process is really protecting against, which is usually a specific bad experience nobody has written down.
The part I have made peace with
Some deals cannot be won and it has nothing to do with you.
The incumbent is embedded, the process exists to document a decision already taken, the budget is committed. Recognising these early is a commercial skill worth more than any technique, because the cost of losing is not the deal. It is the months.
I have learned to ask directly and to accept the answer when it comes. Who else is bidding, what would have to be true for us to win, and has anyone already done work on this. People will tell you far more often than you expect, and a fast honest no is worth considerably more than a slow maybe.
Procurement is not the enemy of good technology. It is indifferent to it, which is worse and much easier to plan around once you stop taking it personally.
I am Issam Fathi, a technology strategist and the product manager of AssetEye by Dronetjek, based in Tetouan, Morocco. I help companies build, adapt, and grow through technology.
