Infrastructure
Your buyers are asking technical questions online. Nobody is answering.
You sell capital projects through RFPs, multi-year cycles and a few relationships held by a small enterprise team. There is no inbound playbook for you to copy. In geothermal, nuclear and data centers, your buyers research long before the RFP, and whoever answers first sets the terms.
A small team and a few relationships defined the market.
We came to this market through solar and the energy supply chain. Utilities, ports, airports and data centers buy the same way, and it’s technical, political and slow.
01
Existing relationship
Most deals start with who your people already know.
02
Early research
Evaluators search and ask AI tools. Someone else answers.
03
Shortlist forms
Written long before anything is public.
04
RFP published
By now, it’s late to be discovered.
05
Technical evaluation
Risk and proof outweigh price.
06
Award
Years after the first question.
The buyer
Technical evaluators and executives.
Engineers, procurement, and leadership weigh the same bid differently.
The cycle
Multi-year.
The shortlist is set before the RFP exists.
The channels
Enterprise sales, conferences, consultants.
Almost none of it is visible online.
By the time the RFP is public, the shortlist is already written.
Failure 01
Relationships don’t scale.
When a senior seller retires, years of access leave with them.
Failure 02
The website is a brochure.
Evaluators arrive with technical questions and find a capabilities page.
Failure 03
Nobody owns early research.
Buyers ask search and AI tools, and get someone else’s answer.
Failure 04
Executives are invisible.
The leaders buyers want to hear from have no public point of view.
Be known before the shortlist is written.
The work happens in the research phase, years before the bid.
First thing we’d look at
What your buyers search, read, and ask before an RFP exists.
We look at the questions your evaluators ask in search and AI tools, and who answers them today. In most emerging categories, nobody credible does. That’s your opening.
Energy, and the systems around it.
Energy
Ports
Airports
Data centers
How infrastructure buyers buy.
Infrastructure · Teardown
How a geothermal developer gets on a utility’s shortlist.
From first public question to awarded contract, and where marketing could have shortened it.
Infrastructure · Industry POV
The RFP is the last step. Here is what happens before it.
Why infrastructure companies need to be known in the research phase.
Let’s Talk
Tell us about your market.
Bring what you know about how your buyers buy. We’ll bring what we’ve seen work in markets like yours, and what we’d look at first.
Book a consultation