An RFP for a CEO search lands on a Tuesday, with three weeks to respond. A named committee, a defined scope, and a scoring rubric are attached. It reads like the opening of a competition.

But really, it’s closer to the end of one.

How many of those have you answered with the quiet sense that the thing was already settled? Not cynically. Just the feeling that you were filling in a form for a conclusion somebody already reached weeks ago.

Most firms build business development around that document and the material that answers it. You know, the pitch deck and the proposal template. Both built for the moment a client announces a search and invites firms to compete, but by then the outcome has often largely been determined. 

That’s a rational place to have put the money. The RFP is the first point where the work becomes visible, and it tells you what you’re being scored on. Little else in business development does either.

Which is how a firm ends up with a proposal template on its fourth revision and no clear idea whether anyone reads past page two.

The buyer research has gotten specific enough to work from.

Where the decision actually gets made

6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, published 12 November 2025 and drawing on nearly 4,000 buyer responses across North America, EMEA and APAC, tracks the point at which buyers first contact any vendor. The point sits 61% of the way through the buying process, having moved earlier from about 69% the previous year, mostly under cost and AI-adoption pressure. Six to seven weeks sooner, in practice.

Earlier contact sounds like an opening. It isn’t, and what’s already happened by the time it arrives is the reason.

By then the buying group has assembled a shortlist of roughly four vendors and put that list in order of preference. 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist before they speak to anyone.

Buyers then purchase from one of those four Day One names 95% of the time, up from 85% a year earlier. 77% said their first vendor conversation was with the firm that eventually won.

That 95% needs stating precisely, because it circulates in a mangled form. It doesn’t mean the first name on the list wins 95% of the time. It means the winner comes from a shortlist that already existed before anyone picked up a phone. Think of it as a guest list, drawn up in private long before the invitations go out. The RFP is the invitation. Which makes the operative question something other than how to rank first. It’s whether you’re on the list at all when somebody sits down and writes it.

Now, here’s the obvious objection. The first conversation is doing the work, and the ranking is just the noise. 6sense tested that directly. Among buying groups that hadn’t ranked a shortlist in advance, the first vendor they spoke with won only 57% of the time, against roughly 80% among groups that had. So the first-contact advantage is mostly pre-existing preference showing through. A horse that leads at the first turn usually wins the race, and not because leading at the turn made it fast.

An RFP, where one exists, confirms a decision already narrowed to four names. A better response competes for the remaining 5%, plus whatever movement happens among those four. 6sense found that 42% of buyers reported a preference shift after speaking with sellers, while only about one in four buying groups changed their final choice.

Why the answer isn’t earlier outreach

So contact them sooner, right? That’s the obvious fix. But the data doesn’t support it.

I’m going to guess that you’ve already tried the obvious version of this. More outreach, earlier, to more people, with better subject lines. Nobody runs a firm for long without having tested that theory at their own expense.

Earlier 6sense research, published in January 2024 and based on 934 buyers of B2B purchases over $10,000, found that buyers initiate contact themselves 83% of the time, and that sellers reaching out before buyers finished their independent research saw win rates fall rather than rise. Early outreach produced no measurable improvement in when buyers responded or in how deals resolved.

A faster email isn’t the mechanism. A firm nobody already knows doesn’t become known by interrupting a process the buyer is deliberately running in private. What’s required is presence that predates the trigger.

6sense’s 2025 data attaches a number to that. 85% buyers had prior experience of the vendor they picked. Prior experience. Not prior contact during the evaluation. 

Which raises the question every firm outside the incumbent set has to sit with. How do you build prior experience with a buying group that has never met you?

The people deciding aren’t the people taking your call

There’s a second reason outreach underperforms, and it comes down to who’s actually in the room.

Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, fielded from 17 March to 3 April 2025 among 1,934 US business professionals, separates two populations inside the buying group. Target decision-makers are the functional experts who evaluate the service directly. Hidden decision-makers hold the final say while representing a function that doesn’t require deep knowledge of what’s being bought. Finance. Legal. Operations. Compliance. Procurement.

71% of those hidden decision-makers report relatively little or no interaction with the sales representatives. They’re inside the decision and outside the sales conversation at the same time.

Here I want to be straight about where the evidence stops and where I start. Edelman surveyed general B2B buying groups. Nobody has run this study on retained search specifically. But my read, from how these mandates actually get bought, is that a search mandate takes this shape more often than not. The CHRO runs the process and takes the calls. The CFO approving a six-figure fee, the board member who has to be comfortable with the shortlist, the general counsel reviewing the agreement, the procurement lead benchmarking your rate against a contingency shop, none of them are on the phone with a search firm, and any of them can end your candidacy without ever having spoken to you. That’s my argument rather than Edelman’s finding, and I’d rather name it than dress it up as data.

Same goes for something else I believe. 6sense’s category of prior experience with the buying group runs wider in search than in most B2B categories. It takes in every executive you’ve placed who now sits on the hiring side, every candidate you interviewed for a search that went to someone else, every director who’s read something you published, and every board member who watched you run a process from the other side of the table. I’ve seen mandates arrive through all of those doors. Also a professional observation, not a measured finding.

What reaches people who never take your call is published work. 95% of hidden decision-makers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach, which puts the sequence in an order most business development gets backwards. The content isn’t what follows the introduction. It’s what makes the introduction land.

What builds a Day One position

Published judgment has direct evidence behind it at the point of procurement.

The 2024 edition of the Edelman-LinkedIn report, fielded in 2023 across 3,484 executives in seven countries, found that when an organization consistently produces high-quality thought leadership, 86% of decision-makers would be moderately or very likely to invite that organization into an RFP process. That’s the exact transaction at issue. Content converting into an invitation. The 2025 edition dropped the question, so the figure carries a 2023 fielding date and there’s no newer version to swap in. What the 2025 edition does show is that the effect holds once you’re in the process. 79% of hidden decision-makers say they’re more likely to advocate for proposals from companies that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership.

The harder problem, for a firm the client hasn’t used before, is incumbency. This is where the 2025 data earns its keep. 53% of both audiences agree that when thought leadership is high quality, brand recognition matters less. Asked what governs their final choice of vendor during an RFP, hidden buyers put expertise in the relevant area first, at 85%, ahead of strategic fit at 76% and understanding of industry trends at 74%. Understanding of the client’s actual business challenges came in fourth, at 68%. The vendor being the safest choice ranked last, at 41%. In effect then, buyers rank demonstrated expertise over brand safety.

Sit with that ordering for a second, because it inverts what most boutique firms quietly assume about themselves. The reputational cover that a Big 5 name carries into the room is the consideration buyers rate the least. Demonstrated understanding of the client’s actual situation, the one thing a smaller firm can produce in writing without needing anyone’s permission, is the consideration they rate highest.

On fees, the 2024 edition found that 60% of decision-makers said good thought leadership made them willing to pay a premium. Same caveat on the date. It describes a fee defense a retained firm otherwise has to build from a standing start, in a room where a CFO is working from contingency comparisons.

The market is moving the same way

Hunt Scanlon reported on 25 March 2026 that the top 50 search firms in the Americas billed $6.69 billion in fees, up 11% with 75% of ranked firms posting growth. Scott Scanlon’s framing was that the winners over the next three years will be the firms that move upstream to shape leadership strategy rather than execute it.

Upstream is a positioning claim. And positioning claims get made in writing long before they get made in a room. A firm that intends to be consulted on leadership strategy has to be visibly thinking about it, somewhere a director can find without asking. 

What this argument doesn’t settle

I’d rather hand you the weak joints than let you find them on your own.

None of the buyer-behavior data here was collected on executive search. 6sense surveyed technology, services and manufacturing buyers whose median purchase ran between $200,000 and $300,000, and for services buyers on their own it ran higher, between $300,000 and $400,000. That’s the retained-fee territory on a senior mandate, and nearly half the respondents were VP-level or higher, which makes the transfer more defensible than most. Nobody has run this study on boards and CHROs buying search.

Edelman’s 2025 sample is the softer joint. US-only, weighted toward director and manager level CXOs at 40%. It describes the wider buying group better than the person who signs, and the 71%, 95%, 79% and 53% figures all carry weight here while describing that population. A skeptical reader has room to refuse the transfer. I think it holds, because the hidden-buyer finding is about function rather than seniority, and a general counsel reviewing a search agreement is doing a general counsel’s job at any altitude. Try weighing it for yourself.

6sense also sells account-based marketing software, and a finding that buyers decide before contacting sellers happens to suit its product story. Its methodology is disclosed and its samples are large, more than most vendor research offers. The commercial interest is still real.

None of that changes the direction of the finding, though. It changes how much weight any single number will bear.

What this changes, operationally

The RFP response stops being your primary business development asset and becomes formality you assemble from existing material in an afternoon. Your case data and your references belong in a maintained library, not in a document written under the deadline at eleven at night.

The asset that does the actual work is the body of published writing indexed to the events that create mandates. A funding round. A CEO departure. A first hire that didn’t take and nobody wants to discuss. A new product line needing a function the company doesn’t have yet. A firm that has already written intelligently about what those events do to a leadership team is on the list when the list gets written, without having sent anything at all.

So here’s the audit, and you can run it this afternoon. Take your last five mandates. For each one, ask what there was to read with your name on it in the ninety days before the client called. If the answer is nothing, those mandates didn’t come to you through the proposal. They came through a relationship that already existed, and there are only so many of those.

The number I’d hold onto is 94%. That’s the share of buying groups that had already ranked a preferred vendor before speaking to a single one of them.