Use an RFP Clarification Call to Find the Real Decision Criteria

An RFP clarification call is the one moment in the entire proposal cycle where the buyer will tell you, in their own words, what actually matters to them. Most teams treat it as a formality, a box to check before drafting begins. That is a mistake. The prospect's answers on this call tell you which questions carry real weight, who reads the response, and what evidence will actually change a score. Treat the call as a research conversation, not a sales pitch, and you will submit a document built around your prospect's stated criteria instead of your own instincts.

Why This Call Goes Wrong

RFP leads often walk into a clarification call already convinced they know why the prospect issued the request. They have handled similar RFPs before, so they assume the reporting question is really about operational capacity, or the fee question is really about negotiating room. That assumption shapes every question they ask next and steers the conversation away from what the prospect actually said.

A second failure is treating the call as a chance to sell rather than to learn. A team member who spends the time promoting the firm's strengths never asks who reads the submission or which sections a committee weighs most. The writers then produce strong general content and miss the two or three specific proof points the evaluator needed.

A third failure is accepting vague prospect language without pushing for detail. When a prospect says something like they want a manager who understands their reporting needs, a team that does not ask a follow up question will guess at the reports, formats, and audiences involved, and that guess often misses.

How to Prepare Before You Ask for the Call

Read the RFP document again before you request time and list every place the language is ambiguous. Note where definitions are missing, where evaluation weighting is not published, and where the document references a standard or policy without naming it. These gaps become your questions.

Decide in advance which of your questions are genuinely clarifying and which cross into asking for a competitive advantage. Most procurement teams will not tell you your ranking against other managers, and asking will cost you credibility. Stick to questions about scope, definitions, audience, and process.

Assign someone to take notes during the call whose only job is capturing exact language, not interpreting it. The person leading the conversation needs to focus on the exchange itself, not on transcription.

Decide who on your side needs to hear the answers directly. If investment, operations, legal, and procurement will each contribute sections to the response, at least one person from each group should hear the prospect's own words about how those sections get evaluated, rather than receiving a paraphrase later.

If you support several sectors, browsing Asset Management practice conversations beforehand shows how these calls tend to unfold in this industry specifically, including the language prospects use and the parts of a response that draw the most scrutiny.

What to Say on the Call

Open by stating your intent plainly. Something like this works well. "We want our response to match how your team will actually evaluate it. Are there definitions, reference dates, or source standards you would like every manager to use the same way." That sentence signals you are not fishing for an edge. You are asking for consistency.

From there, ask how the various reviewers will combine their input. A useful question is, "How will investment, operations, legal, and procurement input get combined into a final score." A prospect might explain that some questions are pass or fail eligibility gates while others feed a committee discussion. Record that distinction exactly as given. Do not decide for the prospect which of their own questions matters more.

Here is how a real exchange might run. The prospect says, "We need evidence that the team can support our reporting needs." Instead of accepting that at face value, the RFP lead asks, "Which reports, audiences, and delivery formats should we address in our answer." The prospect responds, "Mainly the quarterly board package and a data file our operations team pulls each month." The lead follows with one more question. "Should we describe the process end to end, or focus on what your operations team receives." The prospect answers, "Focus on what we receive. We already know how you produce it internally."

That short exchange changes the response completely. Instead of a broad paragraph about the firm's reporting philosophy, the writer now knows to describe two specific deliverables and route the content to the operational owners who can speak to them accurately. If your team has faced a related situation involving what a prospect can request during the process, the post on Managing Client Reference Permission in an Asset Management RFP covers a similar case, where a prospect's request needs to be recorded and routed rather than answered on instinct.

Mistakes to Avoid

Do not answer pointed questions live before you have verified the facts. The pressure to respond immediately during a call is real, but a wrong answer given quickly costs more credibility than a short delay. Say you will confirm and follow up in writing.

Do not let one person on your side promise scope or timelines that other departments have not agreed to. This happens most often when someone eager to keep the conversation warm commits to something operations has not reviewed.

Do not skip building a written record of the call. Without one, different writers interpret the same prospect comment in different ways, and the final response reads as inconsistent to the reviewer even when every section is individually accurate.

Do not treat every prospect answer as final and settled. If an answer stays vague, say so in your notes rather than filling the gap yourself, and use whatever official question channel the RFP allows to close it before you draft.

How to Practice and Score It

A manager can turn this into a short rehearsal before the real call happens. Have the RFP lead run through the opening question, the process question, and a follow up on a vague answer, with someone else playing the prospect and giving deliberately ambiguous responses.

Score the rehearsal on three things. First, did the lead ask an open question before offering an interpretation of what the prospect meant. Second, did the lead capture the answer in the prospect's own words, without adding a conclusion the prospect did not state. Third, did the lead notice when an answer was still too vague to draft from, and ask one more question instead of moving on.

This kind of rehearsal works best as a real back and forth, not a checklist read aloud. Practicing the exchange with an AI counterpart that plays a procurement contact, using DealSpeak, lets an RFP lead hear how a vague answer actually sounds in the moment and get scored on whether their next question opened up more detail or shut it down. Teams preparing for a deadline that shifted midstream might also look at Protecting Review Quality When an RFP Deadline Moves Forwardsince the discipline required to keep clarification answers accurate under pressure is much the same.

A clarification call is not a formality and it is not a sales opportunity. It is the only chance you get to hear the prospect describe their own scoring process in their own words. Ask direct questions, record exact answers, and route each one to the person who can act on it, and your response will read like it was written for this evaluator instead of for evaluators in general.