18 Jun 5 more reasons why the Public Sector is a great client to have in your portfolio
Following on from our Top 5 reasons why the Public Sector is a great client to have in your portfolio, we have a further 5 reasons to encourage you to go after Public Sector work.
The Public Sector covers a whole spectrum of buyers, not just Central Government but Local Government and the Health Sector. These includes Departments with vast sending power, such as Transport, Education, Energy, Defence, Housing, Digital and Environment. All with buying needs as varied as construction, facilities management, IT, recruitment, marketing, security and waste management.
1. Find more customers with Public Sector frameworks. Public Sector clients have moved away from Preferred Supplier lists to Purchasing Frameworks, or Dynamic Purchasing Systems (DPS). Many Universities, the NHS and Local Governments all use this type of procurement, which means that getting your company approved gives you more business opportunities across multiple buyers.
2. Ongoing contracts. Public Sector clients also use Open contracts, with no automatic roll-over. This means that if you miss out bidding for one round, then there will be opportunities to bid for later rounds. The advantage is that your business gets time to plan resources and to improve your chances of a successful bid.
3. Benefit from Public Sector references and referrals. Another advantage of Public Sector clients, is that work for one Local Authority can help your business to win contracts to work with another. Different Trusts or Housing projects are not viewed with the same suspicion as private sector competitors.
4. Bid repetition/Public sector frameworks. Once the work has been done for a Public Sector client then the design, pricing, policies and case studies can be tweaked for use across multiple bids. As long as you remember to tailor each tender for the specific Public Sector client. You can even save time at the registration stage, as long as you keep your details handy! Registering once with a tenders portal should give you access to all of the ITT notices they publish and can be used time and again.
5. Worried about the time it takes to find Public Sector clients? It is one thing to find tender opportunities but how can you make sure that tender opportunities get followed through? Success depends on not just finding contracts but making timely, professional bids, which meet all the buyer’s requirements. You can of course manage it yourself, using in-house time and skills. Or you can use a company that specialise in helping you to handle all the work that bids involve. 9 When choosing who to work with, look at factors such as how clear are they about pricing, or their bid success rate? Do you have to buy a complete service, or is there flexibility to outsource the parts of the process that you struggle to keep up with e.g. contract searches, or the bid writing. Are you better off committed to a rolling contract, or can you use the service to plug temporary gaps (when key people are on holiday)? Are there other services that might help put your business in the best position to compete? Keeping you on top of different compliance policies and legal requirements, or helping you to create new policies? 10
