Focus your efforts on the opportunities that are right for you and avoid the painful searching
There are typically over 5,000 open tenders across the UK at any one time and 20,000 EU-wide.
This doesn’t include the even greater number of lower value contracts that are also advertised in the public domain. This is one of the most positive aspects of developing a business into the public sector, in that there is a regular flow of opportunity with the potential for growth. As the system is based on open and fair competition, if you have the right credentials, you have a legitimate, consistent channel through which to win business.
Many companies therefore recognise the importance that tendering has on their business development and that tracking tenders and keeping up to date with new tender opportunities becomes a vital part of the strategy. However, being presented with a vast number of notices to trawl through each day can be a significant challenge, it is time consuming and often a complex journey to get to the fine-print. Do you know the differences between PIN, EOI, PQQ, SQ, ITT, DPS, RFI, RFQ?
As such, some businesses have developed a process or invested in tender tracking tools to keep as informed as possible whilst minimising the impact on their day-to-day resources. These tools have advantages, in that they can automatically track the market and quickly capture and filter tender opportunities based on your chosen industry keywords and phrases, so that you end up with a list of compatible opportunities. Some tools will send auto-updates each day so that you can potentially get a vital head-start over your competitors.
Although tender tracking tools can be good time-savers, they present you with most of the work still to do. The shortlist can still be quite long, particularly if you have used generic keywords to ensure you’ve captured the whole of the market, with each opportunity requiring further investigation to ascertain whether it is indeed an appropriate and worthwhile pursuit. Reading and reviewing a standard tender notice may take even a trained eye several minutes. More significantly, by failing to fully understand the tender requirements at the outset, and matching these accurately to your business capability, more time and money can be wasted.
Expert knowledge is vital
This is where the use of an expert provides a sharper and more decisive shortlisting tool. An expert uses their professional insight in writing and winning contracts and combines this with extensive experience in reviewing tender notices and detailed understanding of your business, to help you make a much better decisions on the right tenders to pursue.
This approach hands over the searching, reading, reviewing and interpreting to someone else, saving the maximum amount of time and freeing up your resources to focus on only the most constructive and beneficial ventures. Businesses that tender regularly not only save hours each week on tender shortlisting but also achieve a much better return on their investment in tendering.
