How a Leading Waste & Recycling Leader Found $66M in Long-Term Contracts with Ontopical
juin 24, 2026In its first year using Ontopical, a leading North American waste and recycling company won two ten-year municipal collection contracts worth roughly $66M in total contract value.
The Customer
Our client is a regional business development team at one of North America’s largest waste and recycling providers. Their deals are big and slow. A single municipal contract can run a decade and be worth millions a year, so getting into the conversation early matters more than almost anything else.
The team’s mandate comes down to three things: find opportunities before competitors do, shape requirements when possible, and protect existing accounts from being quietly bid out from under them.
The Challenge: Lots of Data, Little Signal
Before Ontopical, the team had no shortage of information. They had a shortage of usable signals.
Every rep had their own routine. They checked multiple bid platforms, searched council websites, and leaned on relationships with municipalities and property managers. Each source told them a little, but nothing stitched it all together.
Key pain points kept surfacing in conversations with sales leadership are:
- Fragmented sources
Each rep had their own mix of BidPrime, Bidnet Direct, and direct outreach, with no single view and lots of duplicated effort. - RFPs were too late
By the time a bid platform flagged an opportunity, the scope was often locked and relationships already in place. The team needed to see the discussions that eventually turned into RFPs. - Buried Early Signals
Council minutes, capital improvement plans, budget documents, even meeting videos all contained hints, but no one had hours to dig through 300-page PDFs. - High noise, low relevance
Searches regularly returned irrelevant projects (like wastewater or road infrastructure) and out-of-territory opportunities, wasting time.
Why Change?
Two things raised the urgency: the stakes and the shift to AI. These contracts are long, high-value relationships. Even small improvements – finding a few early opportunities, protecting one more at-risk accounts can translate into tens of millions of dollars over a decade. Leadership also believed that teams who fail to adopt AI will fall behind. They wanted a copilot that could:- Learn from what the team accepts and rejects
- Surface early signals that humans would miss every week
- Give reps answers from inside large documents and videos in seconds
The Solution: Ontopical as the team’s public sector copilot
The team chose Ontopical because it changed what they were working from. Instead of just a list of RFPs, they got the early signals that come before RFPs.
- Aggregation plus learning
Ontopical consolidates agendas, minutes, and council videos into a curated feed, and gets smarter with every accept/decline decision from the team. - True pre‑RFP visibility
Ontopical surfaces council discussions, capital plans, and budget items that signal future RFPs, not just the RFPs themselves. - Built to complement existing bid tools
The platform fits alongside standard RFP‑notification tools instead of replacing them, so workflows don’t have to be rebuilt from scratch.
The Impact: $66M in contracts & a stronger position in every deal
Within the first year on Ontopical, the team could point to clear, tangible outcomes.
- Revenue Impact
The client won two ten‑year municipal waste collection contracts worth approx. $66M in total contract value from opportunities surfaced through Ontopical. - Higher quality pipeline
Irrelevant projects are filtered out, and reps are seeing more aligned, in‑territory, early-stage signals in their weekly feed. - Time back to sell
Manual cross‑platform research has been collapsed into a single, curated feed, and document review has gone from hours to seconds. - Better early positioning
The team now gets ahead of formal RFPs, engages earlier, understands the “why” behind a project, and positions their organization accordingly.