I can speak to this. Many large clients have the ability to hand out small evaluation projects without competitive bidding. So, they can hire you to do a 10K or

I can speak to this. Many large clients have the ability to hand out small evaluation projects without competitive bidding. So, they can hire you to do a 10K or whatever evaluation but are required to put the resulting 100K implementation through an RFQ process. The eye-opener for me quite some years back was discovering that most of the RFPs we saw were the result of an evaluation like the one described, we were being asked to quote, blind, against the firm that had been paid to write the RFQ in the first place. One tl;dr of this article could be, "Stop responding to RFPs written by your competition and look for opportunities to write the RFPs yourself."