7 Steps to Finding the Right People to Talk to when Bidding on Contracts

It’s the same whether you’re looking for a personal career change or looking to bid on contracts: getting the upper edge involves talking to the right people. In fact, finding the right contact people is crucial to establishing, gaining and retaining business. But bidding on contracts takes a lot of work, and finding out whom to contact regarding your services can be a time-consuming process if you don’t know where to start.

Before you even start bidding on contracts, you will need to start networking. Think about it: who else do you know in the industry? The more contacts you know, the better your marketplace reach.

Contract Networking Tips

The following marketing tips will help you build contacts, giving you an inside edge before you bid on contracts:

1. Identify the contacts within the company that you might not have considered. Even though the buyer may make the final decision, he or she will solicit input from other personnel.  For example, if you sell safety equipment, you may want to contact safety officials or decision makers associated with the company.   Identifying new contacts may also help you penetrate deeper into organizations you already know, to help build new relationships.
   
2. Get the contact information for each personnel member, decision maker and buyer involved at the companies you’re looking to contract with.  To make sure you have the freshest contact information available, turn to a business intelligence company.
   
3. Be up front and ask if the company has an idea if they are budgeting for the services you offer. Ask questions that will help you figure out if they are a prospect. If the company says that they won’t be considering your services in the future, at least you can take them out of the sales pipeline and use your time more wisely to bid on contracts for companies that are.  Use information on past project activity as a road map for likely areas of new contract planning activity.
   
4. Do some social networking to find out who your contacts are - warm up your cold calls! By investigating company personnel, you can transform a name on a computer screen to a person with employment history, association memberships, education background, and other facts, allowing you to establish a quicker, strategic business rapport with prospective clients. It provides a rounded historical perspective of a company’s personnel, highlighting its past and present staff members, and allows you to present yourself as a solution, not a vendor.
   
5. Always try to discover common threads between you and the contact. For example, perhaps you went to the same university as one of the personnel, or worked at the same place of business. You can use these small commonalities to build relationships and influence future contract decisions.
   
6. Establish ongoing marketing campaigns throughout the year. Don’t wait until a request for bids comes out to start your phone calls, by that time it is typically too late. You need to be proactive and start promoting your services earlier, so you can have the time you need to build the relationships needed to to increase your chance of winning the bid, or at least to be considered.  Consistent marketing touches also keep your company top-of-mind when the bid decision is made.
   
7. Follow up on the marketing campaigns, whether you get a response or not. It’s good to let contacts know about your services and your desire to build a business relationship.