Most manufacturers try to build a relationship with an EPC contractor through procurement. They send the catalogue to the buyer, chase the RFQ, and wonder why the engineers never call. The buyer is not the person shaping what gets bought. The engineering team is.
I have spent thirty years selling engineered equipment into projects across oil and gas, mining, marine, rail and power. The pattern holds in every one of them. Earn the respect of the engineers early and every later conversation gets easier.
Equipment gets defined long before a purchase order exists. IChemE's The Chemical Engineer sets out how the FEED phase produces process datasheets for equipment such as vessels, heat exchangers and pumps, which other disciplines then turn into engineering datasheets for procurement and construction. The same phase prepares the project for procurement of long lead items.
Read that again as a supplier. The datasheet your product will be measured against is written by an engineer, months or years before a buyer sends you anything. That is why I call the FEED window the period that tilts the odds.
The buyer runs the process. The engineer decides what good looks like.
None of this makes procurement irrelevant. Plenty of packages are won from the approved vendor list on price, delivery, the operator's preferences and a sharp commercial case. But if the engineering team already trusts you, you walk into that commercial conversation with a head start.
Engineers are busy and allergic to sales pitches. Turn up with a brochure and you get fifteen minutes and a polite exit. Turn up with something that helps them do their job and you get a second meeting.
At Gilkes I saw this play out with engine builders rather than EPCs, but the lesson transfers exactly. A change in emissions regulation meant engine manufacturers had to update their engines. I opened the conversation with their technical teams on the regulation, not on our pumps. That bought early access to the redesign work, and direct engagement with the technical teams helped take the sales cycle from 18 to 24 months down to around 12.
For an EPC engineering team, the equivalent is anything that makes their design safer, faster or easier to defend in a review. These work:
Relationships with engineering teams are built between tenders. Check in when a datasheet revision is likely. Offer a review of a draft specification. Flag a known installation issue before it becomes their problem on site.
On Marjan, the £1.9M package for Aramco through Técnicas Reunidas, I inherited the opportunity late. I worked the lead time backwards with Borja at Técnicas Reunidas, ran bonds and legal in parallel so nothing waited on anything else, and we closed on the operator's on site date. The contractor needed a supplier who understood its schedule as well as it did. Being that supplier is a relationship, not a transaction.
Bechtel's mining work in Chile went the same way. I won it through the engineering relationship and the specification rather than an open tender, positioned as the technical solution before procurement opened.
An EPC engineering team is never one person. In my experience there is a lead discipline engineer, a package engineer, a project engineer, often a technical authority at the operator, and procurement sitting alongside. Each has a different worry.
Map them. Know who writes the datasheet, who signs off the technical evaluation and who owns the schedule. Then make sure each one knows who you are and why you matter to their part of the job. One friendly engineer is a contact. Five people across disciplines who trust your data is a relationship.
I covered how this plays out with the big contractors in getting specified by Técnicas Reunidas, Tecnimont and Saipem. The short version: consistency beats charm. Turn up, deliver what you promised, then do it again.
Pick one live project where FEED or detailed design is underway. Write down the names of the engineers who will shape your package. If you cannot name them, that is your first job.
Then decide what you can give each of them that helps their design. Not a brochure. Something they will actually use.
Being specified is the biggest lever you have, but it is not the only route. If the spec has already gone to someone else, there is still a way in, and I set it out in breaking the spec.
If you want a sparring partner while you build these relationships on a live project, that is what The Deal Room is for, one to one coaching at $500 a month. Or take a 20 minute call and we will look at where your engineering relationships really stand.
Sources: Demystifying Engineering Projects Part 3: FEED and Detailed Design, Steven King, The Chemical Engineer (IChemE), 27 March 2025. Checked 11 November 2026.
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