Whether you operate a small business or work in a large company, securing tenders can be the key to driving success.
Tender contracts not only generate revenue, but can help build a reputation that could unlock doors to more opportunities and partnerships.
You can find tender opportunities in a number of ways.
Monitoring sources yourself
If you’re sourcing tenders yourself, you’ll need to register into every individual buyer’s website to find out if any new tenders have been released.
This will require you to pay your staff to search for tenders when they could working on tender responses, providing your goods and services to customers, or delivering other important business functions.
You’ll also have to spend time finding tender sources in your industry. If you’ve registered to receive emails about new tenders from multiple sources, it will take you time to manage all of these emails and sift through each one to find any relevant opportunities.
This will involve keeping track of all the different tender sources, including login details, when certain sources need to be manually checked for new tenders etc.
Managing emails from a lot of different sources can quickly clog up your inbox, as you must sift through a lot of irrelevant tenders to find ones you’re interested in because most free options don’t allow you to narrow down your search further than a broad industry category (e.g. ‘cleaning’).
Public notices
These are easy sources of new opportunities but will require you to read newspapers, trade publications, and relevant websites, such as illion TenderLink, to find them. But remember, in many industries only a small number of opportunities are publicly advertised.
Private invitations
In many cases, an opportunity won’t be publicly advertised if it’s below a certain dollar value. However, some buyers may always do business with a small group of preferred suppliers.
It is important you find out who the major buyers are in your industry and find out how they conduct most of their procurement. For many buyers the vast majority of tenders are issued via private invitation. If you subscribe to a tender notification service like illion TenderLink, you’ll be able to access published panel tenders and preferred supplier tenders that can serve as an entry into these private invitations.
Tender notification services
Tender notification services such as illion TenderLink can provide access to almost every advertised public tender within your industry area – through one single portal.
This can save you the time and cost involved in looking for tenders yourself, while giving you the confidence that you’re less likely to miss out on any opportunities.
Ultimately, self-monitoring for tenders may be cost-effective initially. However, using a tender notification service offers a more efficient and effective way to find tenders, especially when saving time and resources is a priority.
Moreover, if you missed an important tender that your competitors had accessed, what affect could this have on your business?
Disclaimer: This article and its contents (“Article”) are provided by illion as general information and do not contain any form of professional, legal or financial advice. illion makes no representations that this Article is accurate, current or complete. illion owns (or has appropriate licences for) all intellectual property rights in this Article.