Customer discovery interviews, and how many are enough
B2B customer discovery interviews: the sample size the research converges on, why your segments change that number, and the questions that get honest answers.
Read
Bidding is paid for in the time of the people who would otherwise be selling, and the cost is never written on anything. The decision is faster than most teams make it, and one Saudi threshold rising tenfold in January moves a whole band of work out of tendering altogether.
An RFP arrives and the building reacts to it. Somebody forwards it round, somebody else says we should definitely go for this, and within a day two people have cleared a week to write it. Nobody has yet asked the question that matters, which is whether this document was written with you in mind or written to satisfy a procurement rule after the decision was already made.
Bidding is expensive and the cost is invisible, because it is paid in the time of people who would otherwise be selling. The bid or no bid call deserves the same rigour as the bid, and it is a faster decision than most teams make it.
Three answers decide most of these. If any of them is a clear no, the rest of the document does not matter.
Beyond those three, a document carries evidence of who it was built around. The useful signals are specific rather than atmospheric.
If you sell to Saudi government entities, the arithmetic of this decision changes in January, and it changes in a direction that should move effort away from bid writing.
Baker McKenzie's analysis of the key changes under the new Government Tenders and Procurement Law records that the law was published on 4 September 2026 and takes effect 120 days later, on 2 January 2027, replacing the 2019 law. Two of the changes it lists bear directly on whether a given contract will be tendered at all:
Read the first of those as a seller. A tenfold rise in the direct purchase threshold means a band of work that previously had to go to tender can now be bought directly. For anything in that band the competitive document is the wrong instrument, and what wins is being a registered, pre qualified supplier before the requirement exists.
The analysis is also explicit that the implementing regulations are not final: only a draft has been released for public consultation, and the provisions that matter most to a bidder, including how local content is prioritised and calculated and any mandatory local content percentages, sit in regulations the Ministry has still to issue. So do not rebuild your qualification process around numbers from a draft. The direction is settled, the detail is not.
Teams decide badly here because the cost is never written on anything. Put it on one line and the decision gets easier, because you can compare it against the expected value of winning.
| Input | What to count |
|---|---|
| Writing and assembly | Hours from whoever actually writes, not the hours you wish it took |
| Technical input | Specialist time pulled out of delivery to answer the technical annex |
| Commercial sign off | Pricing, legal review of the draft contract, insurance and bonding checks |
| Bid security | Cash or a bank instrument tied up for the tender period |
| Displaced selling | The conversations that do not happen in the week you are writing |
The last row gets left out and it is usually the largest. A week of bid writing by the person who also runs your pipeline shows up two months later as a gap nobody connects to the tender.
Score each line yes or no. Four or more noes and you are writing for practice.
| Test | Pass looks like |
|---|---|
| Prior contact | You spoke to this buyer before the notice appeared |
| Mandatory fit | Every mandatory requirement met as written, with evidence |
| Registration | You are already registered and qualified on the relevant platform |
| Evaluation shape | Quality carries enough weight for a better answer to win |
| Price appetite | You would sign at the price this process produces |
| Capacity | You could start on the stated date without breaking existing work |
| Decision access | You know who evaluates, and the clarification process is usable |
The test people argue about is prior contact, because it feels defeatist. It is not a rule that cold tenders are unwinnable. It is a statement about base rates, and base rates should change how much you spend per bid.
Three, and they are all legitimate when named out loud rather than used as cover.
You are buying information. A first bid into a new sector teaches you the evaluation criteria, the contract terms and the price level. That is worth money, as long as you bid cheaply and accept that you are paying tuition.
You want the relationship, not this contract. An obviously non generic submission puts you on a list. Buyers remember the supplier who clearly read the document.
The incumbent is visibly failing. A retender with a short extension history is a different proposition from a first award, and that history is often public.
What is not a reason: the pipeline looks thin and writing something feels like progress. That is the most expensive form of activity available to a sales team, and it is indistinguishable from work. We have written before about how that pattern forms, in business development as a system problem rather than an effort problem.
A no bid is a sales action. Reply to the named contact before the deadline, say you are not bidding, and give one honest reason: the timeline, a mandatory requirement you cannot meet, or capacity. Then say what you would be the right supplier for.
That note costs ten minutes and does two things a silent withdrawal cannot. It leaves the buyer with an accurate impression of what you do, and it occasionally produces the most useful outcome available, which is a buyer telling you the requirement was more flexible than the document implied.
If the reason you are declining is that the scope will not hold still, say that plainly. It is the same boundary problem Khaled Badr describes from the supplier side in dealing with a client who asks for too many revisions.
The bid or no bid call is the first gate. What a submission should then contain is in what makes a B2B proposal that wins, the negotiation after a shortlisting is in negotiating with procurement departments, and the public sector specifics of getting onto the register are in selling software to government in MENA. If you should be disqualifying this earlier in the cycle, that is when to disqualify a prospect.
Three.
The threshold figures are Saudi and they are not in force yet. They take effect on 2 January 2027 and the implementing regulations are still a draft. If you are reading this after that date, check whether the final regulations changed the numbers, and do not apply them to Egypt, the UAE or Qatar, which run entirely separate regimes.
The scorecard is a heuristic, not a model. No weightings, no evidence base beyond pattern recognition. Treat four noes as a prompt to argue properly, not as an answer.
Some sectors genuinely run open competitions. Where a buyer has a mature procurement function and a real quality weighting, cold bids win often enough to be a strategy. The way to know is to count: track your own tender conversion rate for a year, split by whether you had prior contact. If the two rates are similar, ignore most of this. If they are far apart, you have an answer that is yours rather than ours.
Send the tender document and your last four bid outcomes. We will come back with a bid or no bid read and the two requirements most likely to disqualify you.
Book a Free Consultation