Do you know where to find tenders and contracts? Perhaps you know that tendering for public sector contracts is something that you would like to do for your business, but are unsure of where to start… Read on to find out more!
There are a number of ways in which you are able to find tenders that are suitable for your business to bid for. There are subscription services such as Tenders Direct and B2B Quote, in addition to free to access tender and contracts databases such as TED (Tenders European Daily) http://ted.europa.eu and Contracts Finder www.contractsfinder.businesslink.gov.uk
Some tender sites and procurement portals will email alerts to you regarding forthcoming opportunities, others (such as Contracts Finder) you will need to visit regularly in order to search for contracts.
Once you have selected a tender opportunity that you wish to pursue, in the case of on-line tenders you will need to register with the relevant portal to express an interest and access the documentation. When registering with such portals, you are usually asked to select category codes against your areas of business. These category codes are then used to alert you of any future opportunities listed on the site that match your area of business. Assuming you are correctly registered, alerts of new tenders and opportunities are emailed to you automatically from the portal(s) – meaning that you do not have to re-visit the sites to check on new opportunities.
If the product or service that you supply is relevant to a particular region, county or geographic area you can use portal registrations such as this as a way of being automatically alerted to contracts in those specific areas. For example, registering with www.supplyingthesouthwest.org.uk (for Council’s in the South West) or www.qtegov.com (for authorities who are members of the NEPO, North East Purchasing Organisation) will enable you to receive alerts from the Councils and other authorities in these geographical areas.
You can also consider identifying your potential public sector customers by authority type, for example, Emergency Services, Council or NHS and registering with their e-tendering sites for those you would like to supply.
Identifying e-tendering portals by region covered or authority type in this way can enable you to receive tender alerts without having to pay a subscription fee to one of the independent tender subscription services.
At Tender Victory, we work with a range of clients in monitoring and pre-assessing their tender alerts. Some of our clients deliver services which are geographically restricted, others are able to work across the Country. For those that are restricted by location, we identify all of the authorities within their reach area who they would like to tender to. For the clients to whom we provide this monitoring and pre-assessment service, our monitoring of their tender alerts from e-tendering portals means that we need only contact our clients with tender opportunities that are right for them to pursue. Accordingly they do not need to be distracted by the many daily emails of opportunities that are just not relevant to them. This works excellently for our clients who need to register in waste categories, but do not provide general or municipal waste services (for which there are lots of alerts!). Another example of where this works well is for our client who supplies the Police, but do not provide products relating to Police ICT (for which there are a number of alerts!).
This monitoring and pre-assessment is our Tender Alerts Administration Service. Please contact us for more information, or follow this link to read more and download our summary of service.
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