How PartnerAZ works.
PartnerAZ is the pre-discovery: the stage before procurement and before any sales call, where a public-sector or enterprise buying team discovers and sizes up technology together layer for public sector and enterprise buying teams. Free for buyers, no vendor can pay to rank higher, and every fit score is a score per criterion, in numbers.
From "we should look into this" to a confident shortlist, with no cold calls. This page covers the five steps, how need turns into a fit score, how vendor outreach comes through one front door, and where PartnerAZ stops.
The five steps
Set your standards, in private.
You define what the decision actually requires: the governance bar, the security requirements, what each department needs the tool to do.
This is private. No vendor sees your standards, and nothing is posted publicly. The same standards apply to every vendor your team weighs, so the comparison is on your terms, not the loudest pitch.
Vendors do discovery once, in a solution profile.
Rather than chasing your team with outreach, vendors submit a solution profile against your standards, what they do for a team like yours.
It sits on file for the whole organization: the vendor does the discovery work once, and your team reviews on its own time. More profiles are not more work, they wait until a real need comes up. Today you see only the profiles filed with you; a browsable marketplace comes later.
The fit score surfaces the best matches first.
A neutral fit score ranks vendors against your standards and each department's preferences.
You can read why each vendor placed where it did and re-run it any time, because the same inputs always give the same result. The score is a score per criterion you set, in numbers, not a paragraph to take on faith. No vendor can pay to rank higher.
Your team discovers together, on file.
Department heads, the end-user team, and the people who use the tool daily get one shared place to weigh in.
Non-managerial users can learn, vote, and flag something for review, so their voice informs the decision without deciding it and without flooding anyone's inbox. Governance and compliance gaps surface here, up front, instead of hours into a vendor conversation.
You decide who is worth a meeting: now, later, or never.
For each vendor, the team makes one call: worth a meeting now, keep on file, or not a fit.
No one is forced into a call to learn the basics. When you do meet, scheduling takes minimal back and forth, and the vendor pre-fills the purpose and their questions in advance. Discovery happened before the meeting, not in it, so the conversation is worth the time.
From need to fit
From need to fit, in three moves.
The same flow reads as three moves, all before any sales call.
Buyers post a need.
A buying team frames the problem in their own words and shares the standards that actually matter for the decision. Standards stay private to the organization.
Bain & Company, B2B Buying Survey, 2023: buying teams that defined requirements before first vendor contact reported higher decision confidence and shorter evaluation cycles.
Vendors submit a solution profile.
Each vendor responds with one solution profile filed against your standards. It stays on file for the whole org, so no one is owed a meeting to learn the basics. The same axes for everyone, so the comparison is apples-to-apples.
Forrester, 2024: the average B2B software decision now involves about 13 stakeholders; a shared artifact lets the group weigh in without re-running discovery.
The team scores together.
Every stakeholder sees a fit score per criterion, in numbers. Decisions happen at the same table, on your standards, before any sales call.
Gartner, 2026: 67 percent of B2B buyers prefer a rep-free buying experience, up from 61 percent the year before. A deterministic score on the buyer's own criteria is what a rep-free first pass looks like.
Vendor outreach
One front door for vendor outreach.
Replace the cold-email firehose with a single intake. Vendors submit a solution profile against your standards instead of landing in your inbox.
The mechanic
PartnerAZ lives on your organization's own site.
Embed the front door on your site as the public intake. Vendors make themselves discoverable to your teams there, in a solution profile against your standards, not through your inbox. You can say publicly that you no longer take cold solicitations and point vendors to that link.
What happens to stray solicitations
If a cold email still lands, you forward only what you choose.
Nothing is automatic, and we never scan inboxes. When you forward a message, a PartnerAZ agent sends that vendor a clean, first-party invite to make themselves discoverable through your link. The original message is not relayed, not passed to its sender's headers, and not stored beyond sending that one invite. The invite is always an honest, authenticated message, never a faked reply.
Where the work ends
Your procurement chain stays exactly where it is.
PartnerAZ ends before the RFI. Your existing RFQ, RFP, and approval workflows stay exactly as they are, but the shortlist they receive already fits.
What PartnerAZ is not
- Not an RFP tool. We are before the RFP, not inside it, and we do not compete with RFx platforms.
- Not procurement. We support procurement; we do not replace it.
- Not pay-for-ranking. No vendor can buy a better position. Visibility in the marketplace (a future browsable layer) sits entirely outside the score. Vendors pay to be seen. They can never pay to rank. Your list is ordered by fit, which is the whole point of it.
- Not a gatekeeper. Vendors make themselves discoverable; no one is accepted or rejected.
- Not a vendor selling to you. We take no cut of any deal and step back after your first informed conversation.
Have a specific question before you read further?
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