For most of my career, every serious purchase ran through the same ritual. Get three bids.
My first job, in 1992, was selling small phone systems and voicemail to small businesses. A buyer would send out a request for proposal, and we knew our competitors got the same one. We answered it with a three-ring binder: every question, every capability, the price on the last page.
Most buyers flipped to the last page. Some threw out the high bid and the low bid and took the one in the middle. Sometimes that got them what they needed.
The savvy ones did something else. They read the most expensive binder first, because it usually had the most capabilities. Then they went back to the middle bid, sometimes the lowest, and asked: can you do all of this too? Or they took the high bidder’s list back to the high bidder and asked them to match the middle price.
That was the dance. The buyer used the bids to get educated, then shopped the education for the best price.
Which meant the most thorough vendor paid a penalty. Whoever took the time to answer every question completely was teaching the buyer what was out there, for free, and the other two got to bid against it. You couldn’t win by educating. You could only lose by it.
So we learned to answer some questions with “negotiable,” or “more information to follow.” Not to hide anything. To give the buyer a reason to call. The binder was never supposed to close the deal. The goal was to get past it and into the room with the people making the decision.
Getting in the room mattered because of when it happened. The buyer was maybe 20 or 30 percent of the way to a decision. Get in then, and you could shape the other 70 or 80 percent. Even the second round, when they invited two vendors back, was more education: the buyer narrowing down what they actually wanted to spend money on. The salesperson’s job was to give enough information, but not so much that the buyer didn’t need you anymore.
That’s how I learned the game from the seller’s side, and it held for decades.
Here’s what it looks like now. The buyer doesn’t need three binders to get educated. They tell AI what they need to buy and what problem it has to solve, in their own context: their systems, their numbers, what the company already knows. AI writes the requirements. Then it finds the vendors whose solutions fit. The buyer plays both sides of the RFP before a single vendor knows there is one. I call that the Kerzie Effect.
The education the RFP used to buy is free now, and it never touches you.
So the seller enters at the very end, if at all. When I was writing The Blast Radius, I asked AI how many people a 50-person sales team would need today. On deals under about $25,000, it said close to zero, and it labeled that its own judgment, not data. On complex deals the salesperson still shows up, but late: for the handshake, and to be the person accountable for a decision the buyer has already made.
Thirty years ago you fought to get in the room at 20 or 30 percent. Today, if they call you at all, they’re 90 percent of the way there.
One question until part three: in your last deal, how far along was the buyer when they first called you?
If the answer stings, that’s the conversation I’m having with sales leaders right now: kerzie.ai/schedule
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