The Gartner Number That Explains Why RFPs Feel Rigged
Widely cited Gartner research on B2B buying puts a specific figure on a feeling most SaaS sellers already carry: a buyer’s purchase journey involves surprisingly little direct time with any single vendor. Buyers spend only about 17% of their total purchase journey meeting with potential suppliers, and roughly 80% of the journey happens with no salesperson involved at all. When comparing multiple suppliers specifically, that already-small share narrows further, to just 5% to 6% of total time with any one sales rep. This finding is frequently republished and corroborated across multiple citing sources, including a Gartner newsroom release, though it was not independently fetched from Gartner’s own page in the course of this piece’s research, so treat the exact wording as worth verifying before quoting it as a direct quote.
An RFP is, structurally, the most extreme version of that same pattern. It formalizes exactly the salesperson-independent research process Gartner’s data describes, on paper, with a deadline attached.
What an RFP Actually Optimizes For
It is tempting to assume an RFP exists to find the best vendor through open competition. Sometimes it does. KPMG’s 2026 Global Third-Party Risk Management Survey offers a different, equally real reason one might run: regulatory compliance is the top driver of vendor-review programs at 48% of organizations, ahead of cyber risk at 37%. An RFP run to satisfy an internal audit trail, or to document that “the market was considered” before confirming an incumbent, optimizes for a defensible paper record, not necessarily for changing the outcome.
That formality is still increasing, not settling. The same survey found 71% of organizations plan further integration between vendor risk management and enterprise risk management over the next three years, meaning the documented, defensible version of vendor selection is becoming the default expectation, not an occasional extra step.
The Tells That a Competition Is Already Decided
Practitioner guidance, not a cited statistic: a turnaround window too short for a genuine multi-vendor evaluation is one tell, real diligence takes real time, and a two-week deadline for a complex enterprise decision suggests the diligence already happened, informally, before the document went out. Requirements written oddly specific to one vendor’s exact feature set, down to language that reads like it was copied from a single product’s spec sheet, is a second. A procurement contact who cannot or will not discuss what differentiates one submission from another, even in general terms, is a third.
None of these signals alone is proof. Together, they are worth taking seriously before investing real time in a response.
Why Responding Anyway Can Still Be Worth It
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. Even a genuinely decided RFP can be worth a real response: it puts a company on record for the next buying cycle, when the incumbent’s contract is up for its own renewal review, and it occasionally exposes that the assumption of “already decided” was simply wrong. A professional, well-prepared response costs far less than assuming incorrectly and walking away from a live opportunity.
What to Ask Before Investing Real Time in a Response
A direct question to the procurement contact, is there an incumbent currently in this category, and what would meaningfully change the outcome versus what they already have, is a reasonable, professional thing to ask before committing real hours to a response. A vague or evasive answer is itself useful information, worth weighing against Gartner’s own data point above: if 80% of the buying journey already happens without a salesperson in the room, a seller who cannot get a straight answer even during the one formal process meant to include them is learning something real about how this specific deal is actually running.
Reading the Real Signal Instead of the Formal Document
An RFP document alone is not built to tell you which of the patterns above you are looking at. A real conversation with the buying team, asked directly and respectfully, usually surfaces the truth faster than any amount of reading between the lines of a written requirements document.
Human + AI SDRs are trained to ask exactly that kind of direct, respectful question early in a procurement-driven deal, so a company can tell the difference between a genuine competition and a formality before committing real time to either.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.