Business Radar for Free Tender Opportunities
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 14:52
Where to Find Tender Opportunities
Tenders are published by buyers in numerous places on the web now. Many buyers publish tenders on their own procurement portals. These are usually membership only websites where you have to register and login to access the tenders.
These tenders are generally not visible to search engines like Google, so you cannot easily search for opportunites which may be of interest to you.
So, the only way to find tenders in the first place, was to register, sign in, then browse around. If there was nothing of interest today, you would have to periodically return to the site to search through the latest tenders.
Over time, as a serious bounty hunter, you would register with other procurement portals. So you would now have to visit numerous websites in turn, login, and look for something worth bidding for.
Some of the sites offer email alerts. Here, you can specify various keywords of interest to your business, and this will trigger an automatic email alert each time a matching tender is published.
Email alerts are good, but you can easily suffer from overload, especially if you set the criteria too loosely. Emails can also sometimes get in the way, as they demand attention when you are not necessarily in opportunity seeking mode. And for each alert, you would still have to re-visit the procurement website and login to see the details.
Tender Publication Sites
There are now many tender publication sites and tender tracking services. These aggregate tenders from the individual procurement authorities (buyers), and publish them all in one place. These services are also membership only, and often require hefty annual fees. Once you have registered and paid up, you would be able to view all the tenders. However, if you found one that you wanted to respond to, you would usually have to go back to the buyers own e-procurement site and register your interest for it there.
So we still have the same problem. The tenders are usually invisible to search engines, you have to register with numerous sites, and keep revisiting them on a regular basis
Shining a Search Light on Tenders
If tenders were made visible to search engines, rather than kept hidden behind membership only sites, this would make it much easier to find business opportunities.
A good example of this is http://www.wmccm.co.uk which has been around for a few years now, providing free electronic access to tenders for companies in the UK, and the West Midlands particularly. This service illuminates tender snippets, which provides sufficient introductory text about each tender to determine if it is of any interest. You can therefore find these tenders in Google Search Results Pages, and only when you find something relevant, do you have to bother logging in to get the full text.
This site still proves useful. Last time I checked, it published about 40,000 tenders a year, there were 1495 live opportunities on the system, and over 9000 companies had registered.
Proliferation of Tender Websites
In my experience of advising SME's about tenders over the last few years, I often hear the phrase:
Oh no - not another *%$+!!! website ....
Tender publication is big business. With £130 Billion of Contracts published each year in the UK Public Sector alone, you can understand why. I think it is inevitable that there will be yet more sites springing up all over the place. But I guess that is the reality of prospecting for gold.
So, if anything, the task of trying to keep up with all the tender opportunities is going to become more difficult.
To help, my Business2dot0 Radar will shortly provide a tender tracking directory, so that you can find business opportunities more easily. And in my next Business Radar article I will show you how to save time by tracking tenders with Newsfeeds!
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