[xwolfi]

In France, the tiny company I was in lost a lot of gov contracts to our absolute surprise since we felt we actually had a better solution for the price.

What we did to start winning was to make friends with the people judging us, offering free services making them personally look good until we started having such relations with them they d ask us out to frame the contracts and give them to us whatever our competitors would come up with.

It's impossible to take decisions based on surprise proposals in a public tender and it felt it was an open secret that tenders' winners MUST be decided before publication.