Tenders – A growth driver?

When in business, there is always the question of how to grow the company. There are many roads that lead to Rome, and many choices to be made when on that road. One of these choices is: which channels are we going to use to grow our turnover? 

To select the right channel, one of the questions you need to answer is whether the effort needed to set up a new channel is going to outweigh the additional revenue that will be generated by this channel.

Tenders – A potential new revenue driver

Recently, I was talking about this with one of our ‘future customers’, as I like to call them. He and his company where doubtful whether to go into tendering or not. They join a tender occasionally, but it is not a core part of their growth strategy yet. To paint the picture; this is a business unit from a billion-dollar company, and they were struggling with the question ‘Am I going to tender or not?’ 

For them, tendering is a completely new channel with enormous growth potential. However, a lot of time and effort needs to be invested in answering these tenders. Due to poor data quality (often on both sides of the tender), connecting the requested articles with their own inventory is often a great deal of work.

What we hear is that, on average, it takes a specialist between 2 to 4 minutes per article to find a match within their own inventory (if there even is a match). File sizes differ from 100 to 1000 products, and sometimes up to 10.000. Answering a tender may take several days, or even weeks, of your experts and key account manager’s time…. But is it time well spent?

Look at it this way; you know there is a lot of potential in tenders and quote requests. One deal can mean a significant contribution to your turnover for the coming years. The only challenges are to minimize the cost of ‘acquiring’ a new customer, win as many attractive tenders as possible, maximize your margins, and to keep your customer happy for as long as possible. Easy enough right ;)?

A numbers game

Sales is a numbers game. When it comes to tendering, some important figures are:

• Number of tenders answered, 
• Time spent on answering those tenders, 
• The win/loss ratio, 
• Deal value/customer value

Let’s say your company answers 30 tenders a year and wins 30%. Imagine if you could take away the bottleneck of cross-referencing the products your client needs to your own assortment? How many more tenders could you process in the same amount of time? 50% more? Double? Even more…? Imagine what a good tool could mean for you. Increasing the number of tenders that can be answered by more than 300%, and improving the win ratio with up to 40% at the same time. That means you are now winning 40 tenders a year, instead of 10. Sounds good, right?

So, how does that sound, growing your turnover by adding a new channel? A channel that might have been out of the question before, due to the amount of work that needed to be put into it. Or one that might have been under achieving. We believe that sales are a matter of numbers. From all the talks we have with wholesalers we know there is a world to win here. 300% more opportunities and a better win ratio. Go get it!