Ghosting (konkurrentposisjonering)

Every competitive bid is read alongside three or four others. Evaluators compare, and they compare using whatever criteria they were given plus whatever concerns are already in their heads. Ghosting is the deliberate attempt to put a concern in that head — one that happens to be a weakness in the offer most likely to beat yours — without ever writing a competitor's name.

How it is actually done

Ghosting is almost always a contrast in the buyer's risk language rather than an accusation. Three forms recur.

Describe the model, not the firm. "Where engineers are subcontracted and mobilised per call-out, response times depend on the availability of a third party. Our engineers are directly employed and rostered to your sites, so the response time in this bid is one we control." No one is named. Every evaluator who has just read a subcontracted model applies it.

Surface the question. "We would encourage you to ask any bidder how many of the named individuals in their organisation chart will be on site in month one, and what happens to the rest." This works when you know your answer is unusually strong and the field's is not.

State the consequence you have priced for. "Migrations of this size overrun where the legacy data is cleansed after cutover rather than before. Our price includes the cleansing work in the mobilisation phase; it is not a variation." The ghost is the variation the buyer will otherwise receive.

The common element is that each statement stands on its own as information the buyer can act on. That is the test of a good ghost: strip out the competitive intent and it is still worth reading.

Where the line is

Do not name and disparage. Read the tender instructions: many explicitly prohibit references to other bidders, and a response that breaches the instructions invites a mark-down or worse. Even where it is permitted, naming reads as insecurity to a panel of professionals.

Do not assert facts about a competitor you cannot evidence. A statement of fact about another firm's performance, staffing or finances that turns out to be wrong is a misrepresentation in a formal submission, and the reputational damage with a buyer you will meet again outlasts the tender.

Do not ghost with information you should not hold. This is the hard legal boundary. In US federal procurement, FAR 3.104-3(a)(1) prohibits knowingly disclosing contractor bid or proposal information or source selection information before the award of a Federal agency procurement contract, and FAR 3.104-3(b) prohibits knowingly obtaining it — restrictions carrying statutory force under 41 U.S.C. 2102. Equivalent procurement integrity rules operate in other jurisdictions. Ghosting is built from published award notices, public accounts, published inspection or audit reports and your own market experience — never from leaked evaluation material or a rival's proposal.

Be careful ghosting an incumbent. The people evaluating your bid usually chose the incumbent and may have managed the contract. An attack on the incumbent's performance can read as an attack on the panel's judgement. Ghost the future risk of continuing unchanged, not the past decision.

Does it work

Only where the weakness maps to something being scored. Evaluators award marks against published criteria; a ghost aimed at a competitor flaw the buyer is not assessing spends words for nothing. If the concern you are raising has no home in the evaluation model, it belongs in a pre-tender conversation during capture — where you may legitimately encourage a buyer to think about what their criteria should cover — not in the response.

What to do about it

Derive your ghosts from a structured competitor review rather than from instinct: list the two or three firms most likely to bid, write their pitch as they would write it, and find the point where their model genuinely costs the buyer something. Choose one or two ghosts, no more, and place them where the relevant criterion is being answered rather than in the executive summary, where an attack is most visible and least evidenced.

Then apply a reader test. Give the passage to a colleague who does not know your competitor set and ask what it says. If they describe a risk the buyer should think about, it works. If they say "you're having a go at someone", rewrite it. Finally, check the passage against the tender instructions on references to other bidders before it goes anywhere near submission.

A note on the term

"Ghosting" is proposal-industry vocabulary with no authoritative published definition; it appears in commercial methodologies and in professional bodies' paid material. The techniques above are practitioner convention. What is not convention is the procurement integrity boundary: those restrictions are law, and they are the part of this page to treat as binding.

Related terms

• Vinnertema
• Capture-planlegging
• Fargeteam (Blue, Pink, Red, Green, Gold, White)
• Beslutning om å by eller ikke by

See Otnox plans to track procurement opportunities across 56 markets.