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Tender expert Rick Bushell founder and owner of Tenderbytes shares his tips with CRN

Advice for buyers:

Scope requirements as tightly as possible. Ambiguity around business needs generally translates into unhappy outcomes (for both buyer and seller) further down the track.

There's some merit in advising companies of your intentions to go out to tender before kicking off the formal process. It provides the opportunity for a 'discovery' phase from both sides. The buyer can become aware of what's available in the market. Sellers can ask questions to better understand buyer needs.

When advertising, it totally depends on what you want to achieve. Do you want to keep things to a limited number of possible suppliers or do you want to explore the wider market?

Advice for sellers:

If winning work via tenders is important to you, the tender process needs to be tightly integrated into your sales and account management. We would advise business to integrate tender opportunities with their sales pipeline - keep a register of current and upcoming opportunities - keep an eye on when documents will be released and when responses will be due for submission - if you know a tender is coming up, establish and/or develop a relationship before the tender hits the market.

Why would companies use organisations such as Tenderbytes?

For the tendering organisation:

If publicly advertised, all high quality tender notification services (like TenderBytes) will pick up tenders and circulate them to their clientele. Organisations can also contact Tender notification services to ensure that they are circulating opportunities to their customer base. 

For vendors/sellers:

Tender notification services are an important tool in the sales kit bag for technology companies. Like it or not, tenders are an integral part of the market.

Arguably, even if tenders aren't a channel that the company utilises, it's a very good way to keep an eye on what is happening in the rest of the industry.

How important is it to check if recipients actually receive tenders?
If it's a restricted tender process, I would expect that there would be some onus on the buyer to contact organisations that the tender has been sent to.

However, as noted above, it's essential that recipients keep track of important customers and keep across when they plan to go to market for products or services via tender. If it's an open market tender, they buyer has no responsibility for ensuring that vendors receive documents.