Most engineering contracts are lost at the shortlist, not at the quote. In 6sense’s 2025 survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, the supplier that won was on the buyer’s day-one shortlist 95 percent of the time. That list is built from what buyers find while they research alone, and in our 1 October sample most of what they found was suppliers describing themselves.
When is the shortlist decided?
Earlier than most sales teams assume. The 6sense 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report puts three numbers on it:
- The supplier that won was on the buyer’s day-one shortlist 95 percent of the time.
- The supplier a buyer contacts first wins about 80 percent of the time.
- Buyers first spoke to a supplier about 61 percent of the way through their buying journey.
Source: 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, nearly 4,000 responses from buyers across North America, APAC and EMEA, checked 1 October 2026. 6sense.com
Put those together and the RFQ looks different. By the time it lands in your inbox, the buyer has usually done most of the work, picked three or four names, and may already prefer one of them. A firm that first hears about a project when the tender arrives is pricing against someone who has been in the buyer’s head for months.
That is why “how do we win more RFQs?” is often the wrong question. The better one is how to be one of the names the buyer already has when the RFQ is written.
Do engineers really do the research themselves?
Yes, and more than most buyers. TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec’s 2025 State of Marketing to Engineers found that 72 percent of engineers and technical buyers do at least half of the buying process online before they speak to anyone at the supplier. The same report found that 86 percent of technical buyers look for independent sources at least some of the time.
Source: TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2025 State of Marketing to Engineers, n = 792 and n = 1,020, global, checked 1 October 2026. advertising.globalspec.com
For an engineer, “online” means datasheets, application notes, the trade press, standards documents, a register of who is accredited for what, and a colleague’s recommendation. It is also, increasingly, a search engine or an assistant asked a plain question. Each of those is a place where your firm either shows up with something useful or doesn’t show up at all.
What do buyers find when they search?
Mostly suppliers describing themselves. On 1 October 2026 we ran 18 buyer questions across four UK power and energy markets (independent connection providers, critical power, battery storage and power equipment) and classified all 168 results by kind of source. 115 of them, 68 percent, were firms’ own pages. Only 29 were third-party sources naming specific firms.
In three of the four markets the pattern was stronger still. Across the ICP, critical power and power equipment questions, 94 of 122 results were firms describing themselves.
Buyer question
“best UPS maintenance companies UK”
What came back
Seven UPS service firms’ own pages, one of which describes itself as among the best. The only “best UPS suppliers in the UK” page listed a single firm, its own publisher, and the only independent source was a review-platform page for one firm.
Sources, by kind
- Own pageSuppliers’ own pages: 7
- ListA supplier ranking itself: 1
- Review siteReview platform: 1
Our readingThe buyer asked for a judgement and got claims. Whoever ends up on that buyer’s shortlist got there on their own word.
Search results sampled 1 October 2026 through a search tool that runs from the US, not Google UK; one run. Firms described, not named. Method on /how-we-measure.
Our September dataset points the same way. We checked 49 UK engineering firms against three buyer questions each, 147 checks in all. 47 of the 49 were visible only through pages they had written themselves, and 40 of the 49 were missing from at least one question a buyer in their own market would ask.
Source: KS Media dataset, 49 firms, 147 buyer-question checks, sampled 10 September 2026. /insights/uk-engineering-ai-visibility-2026-09
When nearly every result is self-description, the buyer’s shortlist goes to whoever wrote the clearest page and got there first. That is good news for a capable firm that hasn’t yet done much, because the bar is low.
Where are the independent sources, and where aren’t they?
Buyers want independent sources, and in most of these markets there were very few to find.
None of the nine trade body and prequalification directories we checked the same day (ECA, BEAMA, AMPS, REA, Solar Energy UK, Achilles UVDB, Constructionline, CHAS and SafeContractor) appeared in any of the 168 results, though five of them run public, searchable member directories. The NERS register did appear, twice, both times at rank one, but only on the two questions that used the scheme’s own vocabulary (“NERS accredited ICP list” and “ICP for 11kV connection”). On the three ICP questions a buyer is more likely to type without that vocabulary, it did not appear.
Battery storage was the exception. There, 22 of 46 results were lists, research, trade press or a press release naming specific firms. But most of the lists came from businesses with something else to sell, including a welfare hire firm and a ranking site that sells visibility reports to the firms it ranks. In storage, someone else is already writing the shortlist, and it is not necessarily the firms best placed to do the work.
The practical point: a listing or a membership is not the same as being seen. A register corroborates a firm only if the register ranks for the buyer’s question, or if something the buyer does find points to it.
Who else is on the buying side?
Not every buyer is an engineer. Maintenance and service contracts in particular are often bought by facilities managers, estates teams, procurement teams and M&E contractors. On the “generator maintenance contract UK” question, three public sector tender notices sat in the top five results, above most of the suppliers.
These buyers search in plain words. On the question a facilities or estates buyer might type, “who can do a new HV connection instead of the DNO”, the answers came from the regulator, a DNO and the network operators’ industry body. None of them named a firm. The firms that did appear were explaining IDNO versus DNO on their own pages.
If your pages are written in product codes and scheme acronyms, the non-engineer buyer may never connect them to the question they asked.
Why isn’t a capable firm on the list?
From what we record in every teardown, five reasons come up again and again. Each one maps to a section of the shortlist scorecard.
| Reason | What the buyer experiences | Scorecard section |
|---|---|---|
| Not findable for the buyer’s words | Searches “UPS maintenance contract UK” and finds competitors, because your page says “critical power solutions” | Findable |
| Nothing independent behind the claims | Finds your page, but no register entry, trade article or named customer that vouches for it | Corroborated |
| Nothing a specifier can use | Can’t download a datasheet without a form, can’t find the standards you work to or the ratings you cover | Specifiable |
| Slow or hard to reach | Fills in a long form, waits days, moves on to the firm that replied the same afternoon | Contactable |
| Never approached | Was never told you exist, because nobody at your firm named them as an account worth winning | Contactable |
The last one is easy to miss. If the supplier contacted first wins about 80 percent of the time, a firm that only ever waits to be found is choosing to be second.
What should you do before the next RFQ?
Four things, each small enough to start this quarter.
- Name the accounts. Write down the 50 to 300 firms or public bodies you would most like as customers, and the people there who buy or specify. A shortlist you can’t name is one you can’t work on.
- Write the piece a specifier needs. One application note or answer page for the question your best buyers ask, with ratings, standards and limits stated plainly. Our guide to writing an application note covers the structure.
- Get one independent source. A register entry your own pages link to, with the certificate number; a trade article about real work; a case study with a named customer’s permission. Our guide to tender and approved supplier lists sets out what each register costs and which ones buyers can see.
- Approach on a signal. When a target account hires a sales engineer, exhibits at a show, appoints a new MD or wins a grant, write to them then, briefly, with something useful. That is how a firm gets contacted first instead of last. Our outbound page explains how we run it.
Where to start
Score your own firm first. The shortlist scorecard takes about five minutes, runs in your browser and shows which of the four areas is weakest. If you would rather see it done by a person, against three competitors you name, the free teardown arrives as one page within three working days. And if the gap is worth closing, the Pipeline Diagnostic turns it into a 90-day plan built from your own quote history.
Quick answers
Be one of the firms the buyer already knows when the tender is drafted. That means being findable for the words the buyer uses, having something independent that vouches for you, such as a register entry or a trade article, publishing material a specifier can use, and approaching the accounts you want before they go to market rather than after.
Often because those firms were on the shortlist before you were. In 6sense’s 2025 survey of nearly 4,000 B2B buyers, the supplier that won was on the buyer’s day-one shortlist 95 percent of the time, and the supplier a buyer contacted first won about 80 percent of the time. Look at what the repeat winners publish and who writes about them, not only at their prices.
Before the buyer talks to anyone. 6sense found buyers first spoke to a supplier about 61 percent of the way through their buying journey in 2025, and TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec found 72 percent of engineers and technical buyers do at least half of the buying process online before they speak to anyone at a supplier.
The sources quoted in this article do not measure price, so they cannot answer that directly. What they show is how a shortlist is built: from what buyers find while researching on their own, and from whether anything independent backs it up. A low price can only be compared once a firm is on the list.
Sources
- 6sense, 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, checked 1 Oct 2026.
- TREW Marketing and GlobalSpec, 2025 State of Marketing to Engineers, checked 1 Oct 2026.
- KS Media, UK engineering AI visibility dataset, 49 firms, sampled 10 September 2026, checked 1 Oct 2026.
- KS Media, How we measure (method for the 1 October 2026 search samples), checked 1 Oct 2026.