Sit in a pipeline review and read the source column top to bottom: RFQ, referral, re-order, an account someone has held for a decade. The team is busy. Quotes go out every morning, follow-ups every afternoon, and the forecast mostly gets hit.
Read the column again and notice what isn't in it. Nothing in the book was started. Every deal arrived.
The buyer chose the category, wrote the spec, built the shortlist, and set the target price. Four of the five decisions that set the margin were made before your team opened the email. The fifth is how fast you concede.
Whoever starts the conversation sets the terms.
The best-priced business I ever wrote had one thing in common. There was no RFQ, because there could not be one. We brought sustainable alternatives to a market that buys on price, and we sold them at a premium. Nobody sends an RFQ for a product that costs more than the one already on the dock. Every one of those conversations started with us, with a buyer who wasn't shopping, because the conversation was landed cost and spoilage, not the price of a box. He had no target number. The category was ours, so the price was ours.
The first number said out loud becomes the anchor, and in a deal that arrives, the buyer said it before you were in the room. A team that quotes and chases spends the whole negotiation working back toward a number it never saw get set. A deal you start has no anchor in it yet.
So run the count. Pull the last twenty deals you won and write one word next to each, us or them, for who started the conversation. Twenty deals, one column, an hour. The share that reads us is your origination rate. It moves with your margin, and an acquirer reads the same column, because revenue that arrived through an RFQ can leave through one.
If the column reads them nineteen times in twenty, look at the design before the people. Order-taking is what a sales team does when starting conversations was never made anyone's job, and the margin gets priced accordingly.
Somebody starts every deal, and that somebody sets the terms. Your source column says who it's been. It doesn't get a vote on who it will be.