By Brandon Van Blerk · Updated 26 June 2026
The RFP You Were Invited To
The best RFP to win is the one you were personally invited to enter. Reputation gets you in the room before the brief does.
The short answer
The strongest position in any RFP is being personally invited to enter it. An invitation means your reputation arrived before the brief, which means you are competing from inside the account, not outside it. Earned inbound beats cold bidding.
Most RFPs are a knife fight you join late, cold, against five others, with the outcome half decided before you read the brief. Then occasionally one lands in your inbox with a note attached: we would really like you to be part of this.
Those are different animals. The invitation means someone already vouched for you in a room you were not in. You are not bidding to be considered. You are confirming what they already suspect. The work to win it happened months earlier, in deals and conversations that had nothing to do with this brief.
This is what earned inbound looks like. It does not feel like marketing because it is not. It is the compound interest on every result you delivered and every relationship you did not let go cold.
You cannot buy your way onto that list. You earn it, the same way you earn a reference you did not ask for. It is all earned attention arriving with your name already attached, and it is exactly how a trainer nobody had heard of ends up on the shortlist.
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