Setting up tender alerts that match your business

Departments do not describe work the way suppliers do. A cleaning company calls itself a cleaning company; the tender says 'hygiene services', 'janitorial services' or 'housekeeping'. A guarding company sees 'security'; the advert says 'physical guarding', 'access control' or 'manned protection'.

The practical method is to read thirty adverts in your line of work and write down the nouns actually used. That list, not your service brochure, is your keyword set. Three to eight terms per line of work is usually the right density.

Businesses tend to define their alerts around their core offering and exclude adjacent work they are perfectly capable of. A company doing office cleaning can usually do post-construction cleaning, and often window and carpet specialist work too, but if none of those words are in the keyword list the adverts never arrive.

Add the adjacent terms and evaluate the results by hand for a fortnight. Volume you can skim is more useful than precision that hides opportunities.

Province filtering is the strongest noise reduction available, and the most commonly misconfigured. Select the provinces you can actually service and deliver in, including the ones you would travel to for a contract of a certain size, and exclude the rest.

Remember that national tenders may be advertised centrally while the work is performed regionally. If your alerts filter provinces strictly, you can miss a national advert for work in your own city. Where a tool distinguishes national from provincial, include national alongside your own province rather than instead of it.

If you have delivered for a department before, its repeat work is the highest probability pipeline you have. A buyer-name alert catches everything that department advertises regardless of how the description is worded, which covers you when the category is misapplied.

This is worth doing for the two or three entities that dominate your sector. A road maintenance contractor should watch SANRAL tenders by name; a plant supplier should watch Eskom tenders and Transnet tenders directly.

A tender you hear about on day one and a tender you hear about on day twelve are not the same opportunity. If a compulsory briefing is on day five, the second one does not exist for you at all.

This is why the delay on an alert service is the specification worth checking, ahead of how many tenders it claims to carry. On TenderFinder the free plan sends a daily email with results delayed by 48 hours, and paid plans from R79 per month remove the delay and add alerts matched to your own keywords. See pricing for the detail, or start with the tender bulletin.

Keyword lists go stale. You add a service, drop another, get CIDB graded a level higher and become eligible for contracts you previously filtered out. An alert list built two years ago is describing a business that no longer exists.

A quarterly review takes ten minutes: add terms for anything new, widen the grading or value band if your capacity changed, and remove terms that have produced nothing but noise for three months.