The Benefits of Active Listening During the Capture Phase

Welcome to the third post in my series on “Leading from the Proposal Trenches.” If you’ve been following along, you’ll know that I kicked things off by highlighting the importance of proposal leadership, followed up with a dive into how and why execs need to be involved throughout the bid process. If you missed them, I’ve included the links below.

Today, we’re shifting gears to tackle one of the most underrated superpowers in the capture professional’s toolkit: the ability to shut up and listen.

The main focus of this article relates to active listening in the Capture Engagement/RFP shaping phases, when you’re working with the customer to understand their priorities, influence requirements, and build trust. But listening skills are also invaluable during internal discussions, whether you’re at the qualification, planning, or solution development stages.

Talking isn’t winning

Capture is not a speaking competition. You don’t win by having the flashiest slide deck or the most airtime in customer meetings. Yet time and again, I see well-meaning capture leads dominate conversations, pitch solutions too early, or spout off rehearsed value propositions before they’ve even begun to understand what’s really going on behind the customer’s curtain.

This is more than a missed opportunity; it’s a strategic error.

When you spend more time talking than listening, you risk confirming your own assumptions, missing valuable context, and alienating the very stakeholders whose support you need to win. The louder you get, the less you hear. And when you pitch your company’s solution before listening to what the customer believes their problem actually is, even if you think you already know, you’ve already put the nail in the ‘impression’ coffin for that project.

The real power of capture phases

The capture phase is where strategy is shaped. It’s the part of the pursuit lifecycle that sits between the market scan and the RFP drop. It’s your one window to gather insight, test assumptions, build relationships, and influence how the customer frames their need. And guess what? None of that happens if you’re doing all the talking.

Listening is not passive; it is an active, deliberate form of intelligence gathering. Done well, it reveals the nuances that don’t make it into the RFP documents. These include unstated priorities, internal politics, evaluator preferences, organizational biases, and the risks that everyone’s pretending aren’t there.

It’s also how you begin to build real trust. Customers don’t want to be sold to; they want to be understood. Listening shows respect and positions you not as a bidder, but as a partner. That difference matters.

What deep listening unlocks

I’ve been in rooms where the conversation on the surface was about price, but the real concern was reputational risk. I’ve seen technical specs that read like a shopping list, only to learn the buyer was terrified of implementation failure. These insights don’t come from asking a question and jumping in with a pre-approved answer. They come from listening to what’s said, what’s implied, and what’s left unsaid.

Deep listening helps you:

Identify who the real decision-makers are and what keeps them up at night
Spot the language patterns that reveal cultural fit (or friction)
Understand internal dynamics between users, buyers, and influencers
Uncover the customer’s fears, not just their needs
Hear the subtext that informs how they’ll evaluate bids
Pick up on phrases that reflect the organization’s values or pain points – words you can later echo in your proposal
Detect contradictions or hesitations that hint at internal disagreements or a lack of alignment

What you risk by not listening

When capture teams rush to pitch instead of listen, they often:

• Misalign their solution to the customer’s true needs
• Miss the opportunity to shape the RFP
• Alienate stakeholders who feel unheard
• Waste time pursuing unwinnable bids
• Build strategies around false or incomplete assumptions

These risks are just as real when you are the incumbent and rebidding at contract renewal. It’s too easy, as the current supplier, to be complacent and assume you know what you need to do to win. Actually, you could argue, it’s even more important to pay attention, as this example shows:

One of our clients was chasing a major recompete. They had been the incumbent for years and were convinced that their track record and technical depth/expertise would speak for themselves. But during an early customer engagement, we noticed a pattern: the Government Program Manager kept using the word “integration.” Not innovation or efficiency, but integration. It wasn’t a major evaluation criteria item, but it was sprinkled throughout the Performance Work Statement (PWS).

But the PM really picked up on it and emphasized it was telling us something critical. The customer wasn’t looking for flash or new technology; they were craving stability…someone who could make all the moving parts work together seamlessly. We shifted the capture strategy to highlight interoperability, transition readiness, and continuity of performance.

That quiet insight from the PM, drawn purely from listening between the lines, completely reframed the story, and they won.

Knowing when to talk and when to zip it

Of course, there’s a time to speak – to test your understanding, to show alignment, to build credibility. A really good tip is to ask for permission before you do, e.g., “Thank you for sharing x, y, z – is now a good time for me to summarize my/our understanding to check that I/we have understood everything correctly and not missed anything critical?” By asking permission, you’ve given the customer control of the process as opposed to bulldozing your way through. It builds trust.

But that moment comes after you’ve earned the right to contribute.

Capture professionals often mistake silence for weakness. In reality, it’s a sign of control. A well-timed pause can reveal more than a dozen questions ever could. When you speak too soon, you close off information. When you wait, people elaborate, they clarify, and they correct themselves. And sometimes, they offer the kind of insights that shift your entire win strategy.

One of the best habits I’ve developed is ending meetings with: “Is there anything we haven’t asked that you think we should know?” You’d be surprised how often that question unlocks something critical.

How to listen like you mean it

Deep listening is a skill that takes practice, patience, and a willingness to sit with silence. Here’s how to build the habit:

Shut the laptop: Notes can wait. Eyes up, ears open.
Don’t lead with your solution: Ask open-ended questions, then let them breathe, don’t rush in with the next question.
Reflect and clarify: “It sounds like your concern is X, is that right?” earns more trust than “We can solve that with Y.”
Watch the body language: Micro-reactions often speak louder than words.
Pause before responding: Give them space to fill the silence – that’s often when the gold comes out.
Include some of your team in meetings: Sometimes your technical lead hears a different message than you do. Compare notes.
Keep your ego out of it: You’re not there to prove you’re smart. You’re there to prove you understand.
Read between the lines: Pay attention to what they’re not saying. Gaps can be more telling than statements.

Silence is a strategy

Too many capture efforts fail because we assume, assert, and over-engineer before we truly understand. The next time you walk into a capture meeting, resist the urge to impress. Instead, aim to uncover. Treat silence as your secret weapon and let listening be your competitive edge.

Make space for your customer to talk. Make space for your team to reflect. And most importantly, make space for insight to surface. Because in the proposal trenches, the leaders who win aren’t always the ones who talk the most. They’re the ones who hear what others miss.

Previous posts in the series

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About the author

Mindy Marchel is Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of Salentis International. With 17 years of proposal development experience, Mindy brings a sharp focus on what it takes to win. As co-developer of The Salentis Way® she empowers teams around the world to deliver maximum quality and value to government, infrastructure, energy, and IT clients. With over 150 projects totaling more than US$100 billion under her belt, Mindy supports Salentis teams across the Americas, Asia Pacific, and UK-EMEA – all with one goal: to craft compliant, compelling bids that make our clients the obvious choice.

Article published: November 2025

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