Learn how to build relationships within the Public Sector
Pre-bid engagement is the process of building a relationship with decision-makers and commissioners behind procurement teams before a contract comes out to market.
Introducing yourself and your business on a personal level can open the opportunity to offer advice and best practice around the specification. This can work greatly in your favour as you are essentially helping to shape the specification before the contract notice has even been published.
If it is an existing contract that is coming up for renewal, you can help the procurement team to assess where improvements can be made and how to ensure the new contract will uphold these improvements. To give yourself the best chance of winning the work, angle these potential improvements towards your service offerings.
How can you use CA to help you with this process?
CA’sLive Contracts provide visibility of, well, contracts that are currently live in the market.
Live contracts have an end date and this date is crucial knowledge as it provides an idea as to when to start your pre-bid engagement process.
Typically, pre-bid engagement would be most effective when the process is begun when a contract is 6 months away from finishing. Why? Because the procurement team, at this point, will be conscious of the imminent closure of the contract so will naturally be more open to conversation.
Why ‘pre-bid engage’ with your potential customers?
Ultimately, a pre-bid engagement process will save you time, win you more work and help you to establish a solid relationship with key stakeholders in contract agreements.
Approaching a procurement authority and offering your time to assist in reviewing the performance of a contract coming to a close, is just the foot in the door.
Using your industry knowledge, sitting down and going through the profitability and efficiency of the contract will not only give your potential customer a better understanding of what needs to improve, but it will also give you the opportunity to discuss how your deliverables will offer better value for money on the next contract term.
On one hand, this naturally builds the working relationship between yourselves and the commissioners of the contract. On the other, providing knowledge of best practices helps to shape the specification for the contract’s new term.