Once you have decided to explore tendering to grow your business, it’s absolutely key that you start to look at available opportunities and put in place a process to ensure this is done on a regular basis.
Where to look for tender opportunities?
Public sector contracts, that is to say those for the government and its agents, the NHS and councils, are in the public domain.
There are two main websites detailing these contracts:
- Contracts Finder, for contracts over £12,000
- Find a Tender, for contracts over £139,688
At Complete Tenders, we have combined the listings from these two websites into one, easy-to-search portal, which also emails you new opportunities in your chosen sectors daily. Click here to find out more.
Tops tips when searching
When using a tender search portal, make the most of the search functionality available to help narrow down the searches. With thousands of opportunities live at any one point, you don’t want to try and trawl through them all.
Here are a few tips from us:
-- Use the search term functionality
Remember to try a few different terms and see what comes up. If you are a cleaning company, as an example, you may want to try a few different variants such as cleaning services, commercial cleaning, school cleaning, NHS cleaning, etc..
Consider using a variety of industry terms and their variations, and think about words that are commonly misspelt and try those too. The information detailed on the opportunity is manually input and is subject to human error a so keep an eye out for this.
When you find a good opportunity, make note of the terms you used to find it.
-- Don’t be fooled by the contract value
Many opportunities have this as £0 so consider this when searching. You don’t want to limit your search for say, opportunities over £200k only to find you missed your ideal opportunity as the buyer didn’t state the value.
On the flip side, a contract may appear to be too large however a £40 million contract could be split into multiple ‘lots’ of small contracts.
On this note, you may also want to consider looking at Frameworks, which can be a good place to start when you first start to tender. These can often be high value but are split across a number of suppliers. You are approved to be on a Framework and then buyers can choose to use you from the list of ‘approved’ suppliers.
-- Think about the dates you are putting in
You can usually search by dates published and also deadline dates. Think about this when searching, you don’t want to search and see that your perfect opportunity has to be submitted today, so consider what dates you can work too.
-- Dig deeper than the name of the tender
The names given to tenders can sometimes be misleading, so don’t just look at the title. Take a read of the opportunity in a bit more detail, it may say NHS Opportunity in the title but is this providing beds, equipment, consumables, lighting, transport, the list goes on.
A generic titled tender could also have a number of ‘lots’ within it meaning you don’t have to be able to fulfil the whole contract but a part of it.
Download the documents and read in detail. To do this you will need to go to the buyer’s portal which is detailed in the contract notice, express your interest in the opportunity (there is no obligation for you to do anything here) and this will then give you access to all the documents.
Creating a regular process to find opportunities
Finding opportunities is not something you just try on one day, find something and then you are done. You need to have processes in place to search regularly to avoid missing a key opportunity.
In doing this you will start to understand more about the buyer’s quirks, what they do and don’t say in their tender notice, what contracts fit your business, and you’ll also narrow down the number of opportunities you need to review - a weekly search means only having to look at 7 days worth of notices.
Looking to get started?
Why not try our 7 day free trial of our Open Tenders account. You will have an opportunity to try the search functionality and also see what is sent through to you on the daily alerts which come straight to your inbox.
Alternatively, if you want someone else to do the hard work for you, take a look at our Personal Tender Search.
