Why borrowed vocabulary is invisible
A named vendor triggers procurement's antibodies. Everyone knows to ask why. Borrowed terminology does not, because it wears the costume of a real requirement. "The system must support swimlanes" parses as a feature ask. It reads as neutral. It is not. Swimlanes are one product's answer to the question of how you segment work in progress. Kanban columns are another answer. A status field with saved filters is a third. All three solve the underlying need, which is to see work grouped by state. Only one of them is written into your spec, and it is there by accident of biography.
The vocabulary persists because it is efficient to copy. The stakeholder who used the tool for three years has muscle memory for its terms. Writing "journey canvas" is faster than writing "a way to design and edit multi-step customer sequences with branching logic." The precise, vendor-neutral version takes effort. The borrowed version is free. So the borrowed version wins, and the unstated preference travels straight into the evaluation criteria unchallenged.
app.isvcosell.com/ISVCOSELL/ask
ISVCOSELL reads a requirement and flags the product-specific phrasing, then restates it as an outcome.
THE SAME JOB, TWICE
TODAY, BY HAND
Read the requirements line by line and try to spot which phrases are product jargon versus genuine needs
Search internally for who wrote each line and ask what tool they used before, by email
Build a spreadsheet mapping each borrowed term to a plausible neutral outcome, guessing at intent
Redraft the affected requirements and route them back to stakeholders for sign-off
Roughly 10 hours, spread across two weeks of back and forth
WITH ISVCOSELL
Paste the draft requirements into ISVCOSELL and ask which lines encode a specific product's design
Accept or adjust the vendor-neutral rewrite ISVCOSELL proposes for each flagged line
Open the matching benchmark to see whether the implied approach tracks market pricing
Export the cleaned, outcome-based requirement set for the RFP
About 25 minutes of your attention
What changes: 10 hours of reading, email archaeology and redrafting becomes about 25 minutes of review. Across a team running six sourcing events a quarter, that is roughly 60 hours a quarter returned, and a shortlist that stays two or three vendors wider than it would have been, which is where the price competition lives.
PART TWO
How the narrowing inflates the price
When a spec is written in one product's dialect, the vendors who share that dialect look like an obvious fit and the vendors who solve the problem differently look like they are missing features. The differently-shaped vendor now has to spend the evaluation explaining why its status filter does the job of your swimlane, and it usually loses that argument on optics rather than on merit. You end up with a shortlist that is not the best three answers to your problem. It is the three answers that happen to use your author's old vocabulary.
A thin shortlist is expensive in a specific, measurable way. When the vendor that matches your language knows the alternatives look awkward on paper, it has less reason to discount. This is the same mechanism as a flat mandatory list that collapses your options to one. The fewer credible substitutes are at the table, the closer you pay to list. And because the borrowed vocabulary sometimes describes features no single competitor bundles the same way, you can drift toward a spec that adds up but nobody actually sells, which forces custom scope and premium pricing.
"A shortlist narrowed by vocabulary is not the best three answers to your problem, it is the three answers that speak your author's old language."
PART THREE
Translate the language, then price the approach
The platform motion has two moves. First, ISVCOSELL reads the draft and separates the outcome from the interface word. "Journey canvas" becomes "design and edit multi-step sequences with branching." "Case timeline view" becomes "chronological record of all activity on a work item." The outcome is what you actually need, and stated that way it is answerable by every vendor that can meet it, not just the one that named it that way. This is the same discipline as translating a product name back into a problem, done at the level of the individual requirement line.
The second move is the check that matters most to your budget. Once the requirement is neutral, benchmarking tells you whether the design the borrowed vocabulary implied is actually the market standard or a premium path. If the implied approach corresponds to a product tier that closes well above the median for the outcome, that is the signal that the vocabulary was quietly steering you toward a more expensive answer than the problem required. Survey-based numbers will not show you this, because they flatter the field. Researched pricing evidence from closed transactions will.
app.isvcosell.com/benchmarks/detail
Percentile bars show where the implied approach sits against comparable deals for the same outcome.
With the outcome stated neutrally, you can pull up to the modelled peer cohort for the capability rather than the vendor, and the percentile view tells you whether the implied design is a market-rate answer or a costly one. That is the difference between paying for the outcome and paying for a stakeholder's habit.
PART FOUR
What changes, concretely
1 Every requirement line gets a neutrality pass. ISVCOSELL flags phrasing that matches a specific product's navigation and proposes an outcome-based rewrite you can accept or edit. The spec stops carrying an unstated preference.
2 The outcome is priced, not the interface. Once stated neutrally, the requirement is benchmarked against comparable closed deals so you see whether the implied approach is market rate or premium.
3 The shortlist stays as wide as the problem allows. Vendors that solve the need differently are no longer disqualified on vocabulary, so more credible substitutes stay at the table and compete on price.
4 You keep the audit trail. The original phrasing, the rewrite and the benchmark that justified it sit together, so when a stakeholder asks why their term was removed you have a documented answer, not an opinion.
PART FIVE
What this does not solve
Translation removes the accidental steer. It does not remove a genuine, defensible preference. If your stakeholder has weighed the alternatives and still wants the specific design, that is a legitimate decision, and the platform's job then shifts from widening the field to pricing the choice honestly. ISVCOSELL will tell you what that design costs against the market. It will not tell you the preference is wrong.
It also cannot read intent that was never written down. If the borrowed vocabulary reflects a decision made in a corridor before intake opened, the requirement may look neutral after translation while the outcome was already fixed elsewhere. That is a different problem, and it needs a different intervention. And no benchmark replaces judgement about fit. It tells you where a price sits and how wide your options really are. The decision, and the responsibility for it, stay with you.
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About the author
Morten Andersen, Cofounder, ISVCOSELL
Morten brings two decades of enterprise and software procurement, with stints across Oracle, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce shaping how he reads a deal. He has led sourcing through hundreds of renewals, from mid market order forms to nine figure global agreements, and learned that the buyers who win are the ones who walk in knowing the market. He built ISVCOSELL to make that pattern recognition repeatable.
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