Find RFP opportunities your team can win

The RFP opportunities worth your team's time often show before the tender notice does: in a buyer's prior information or pipeline notice, a market engagement invitation, a framework reopening or a conversation on an account you already hold. So judge your search by how many of its finds pass bid/no-bid, recorded by where each came from, not by how many notices it returns. The work runs in six stages: cover the portals your buyers publish on, set alerts on the codes and words they use, read the notices that come before the tender, find frameworks before they close, bring private RFPs in through your accounts, and triage weekly against bid/no-bid.

What you need before you search

Write down what a winnable bid looks like for your team before anyone sets an alert, because every search term and every triage call gets tested against it. You're already weighing how many bids you can staff and what each one costs against its chance of winning. The search should start from the same judgement.

Put five things on one page:

• the services you deliver, in your buyers' words as well as your own
• the countries and regions you can deliver in
• the smallest and largest contract you can carry
• your current bid/no-bid criteria
• how many bids your writers, subject matter experts and reviewers can take on in a quarter

Then name the people. One person owns triage. They don't have to be the bid manager, but they need to know the criteria well enough to turn a find down in a minute, and they need to be there every week. Sales and account managers belong in the search too, because private-sector RFPs reach you through accounts and supplier registrations, not public portals.

Last, set up a find log. A shared spreadsheet will do, as long as it has these columns:

• date found
• source: the named alert, notice, framework, list or account it came from
• buyer and service line
• deadline, or the expected date for an early signal
• triage outcome
• bid/no-bid outcome
• result

The source column is the one that matters. Without it, you can't tell which channels bring the bids you win.

Cover every portal where tenders are published

Register on every portal your buyers publish tenders on, because a notice you never see can't reach bid/no-bid. For public work, where to find RFPs depends on the contract's value and the country it's in.

Above and below the EU thresholds

Above the EU thresholds, start with TED; below them, add each country's national portal. TED gives free access to public contract opportunities from the EU, the European Economic Area and beyond. Below the thresholds, the picture splits. The European Commission's Single Market Scoreboard notes that national rules apply there and that publishing such tenders on TED is voluntary in some cases, so lower-value tender opportunities also need each country's own portal.

To find those portals, start from the Commission's list of national contact points and portals. Most links lead to national administrations' guidance rather than tender listings. Follow each one through to the portal where that country's buyers actually publish, and check that buyers in your sector post there before you register.

How to find tenders in the UK

In the UK, cover Find a Tender, Contracts Finder and the three devolved portals. Find a Tender is the service for high-value contracts in the UK's public and utilities sectors. Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England and with non-devolved bodies.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland run their own portals, which the Government Commercial Agency (GCA, formerly Crown Commercial Service) lists in its guide to finding tender opportunities: Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales, and eSourcing NI with eTendersNI. If you deliver in the devolved nations, a search that stops at Find a Tender and Contracts Finder leaves part of your market unread.

Set alerts on the codes and words buyers use

Set one named alert per service line on each portal, so every find arrives tagged with the line and the alert that caught it. Registering on TED lets you save search profiles and get email alerts built on them. In the UK, GCA's guidance on becoming a framework supplier notes that registering on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder gives you alerts for new opportunities in your business area.

Build each alert on two things. The first is the classification codes buyers tag notices with, such as CPV codes. The second is the words buyers write in titles and descriptions, because a notice filed under a neighbouring code only turns up on its wording. For example, a team selling managed security services might add "security monitoring", "SOC" and "cyber defence" to its codes. Add exclusion terms for the work that keeps turning up but that you don't deliver. Your service list from the first step, in your buyers' words, is where all these terms come from.

Give each alert a name that says the portal and the line, such as "TED - security services - DE", and enter that name in the source column whenever the alert produces a find. That's what lets you prune alerts later on evidence rather than on a sense of being swamped.

Paid tender-alert services pull many portals into one feed. If you trial one, log it as its own source, so it's judged by the same measure as the free alerts.

Read the notices that come before the tender

Read the notices buyers publish before the tender, because they give you time to prepare that a tender notice alone doesn't. Each one goes into the find log as a dated entry, months before anyone would otherwise start.

Prior information notices in the EU

In the EU, a prior information notice can tell you about a contract before the call for bids. Directive 2014/24/EU lets buyers announce planned procurements this way. Check that your TED searches return prior information notices as well as contract notices, and log each relevant one with the buyer and the expected date.

There's a further reason to look early. The European Commission's 2025 Single Market Scoreboard reports slightly lower competition in public procurement, with more tenders attracting a single bidder and more direct awards. A search that reads only contract notices sees part of the market.

Pipeline and engagement notices in the UK

In the UK, read three notices that come before the tender: pipeline, preliminary market engagement and planned procurement. The Procurement Act 2023 has governed new public procurements since 24 February 2025, and GCA's explainer on its notices sets out what each one means.

A UK1 pipeline notice lists contracts of £2 million or above that a buyer plans to award in the next 18 months. So read the pipelines of the large buyers you sell to and log their contracts with dates.

A UK2 preliminary market engagement notice invites suppliers to industry days or supplier questionnaires, which work much like an RFI. When a tender arrives cold, check what came before it. If there was a UK2, your alerts missed it and need fixing.

A UK3 planned procurement notice warns that a specific procurement is coming, so plan the bid from the UK3 rather than waiting for the tender.

GCA also publishes its own upcoming procurements, including planned supplier engagement. Its guidance on market engagement gives the reason to take part: engagement gives suppliers early sight of a buyer's requirements. Log each engagement as a find and triage it like a tender.

Find frameworks before they close

Find each framework that covers your services before its application window closes, because once a closed framework starts, no new suppliers can join. GCA's guidance on joining frameworks says this directly. A team that misses the window waits for the next procurement.

Open frameworks give you more than one way in. GCA's page says an open framework takes new suppliers at several points in its life. Each reopening is a dated opportunity: put it in the find log as soon as you know of it, with its expected date, and treat the application as a bid in its own right.

Registering on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder gets you alerts, not a place on a framework. Make sure your codes and words would catch a framework for your service line as well as single contracts. When one turns up, read the notice for its term and its buyers, because those decide how much later work sits behind it.

Some buyers keep approved-supplier lists that never come up as open notices. GOV.UK's guidance on tendering for public sector contracts tells suppliers to contact local councils and other public sector organisations directly about becoming an approved supplier. No alert finds these lists, so give the job to a named person and log each list you join as a source.

Deciding which windows to commit a team to is a bid/no-bid call like any other. Weigh it on the buyers behind the framework, and on whether your log shows you passing bid/no-bid with those buyers when they tender directly.

Bring private-sector RFPs in through your accounts

Make your sales and account managers part of the search, because private-sector buyers turn to sellers while they're researching what they need. In a Gartner survey of 645 B2B buyers, run in August and September 2025, sales reps remained the most important information source when buyers were researching a business problem or need. The same survey found buyers used an average of seven information sources during a recent purchase, so no single relationship or channel will catch every RFP.

That puts account managers close to a need while the buyer is still researching it, but it helps the search only if they pass what they hear on in a form the triage owner can use. Ask them to log each signal in the find log, with:

• the buyer and the person who raised the need
• the need, in the buyer's words
• the expected timing, and whether the buyer plans an RFP or another route
• who else the buyer is talking to, where they know
• their own name, as the source

Ask for the entry when the buyer first describes the need, not when the RFP arrives. By then there's less you can learn before you write.

Where a key buyer runs a supplier registration, get your organisation registered and keep its details current. Log each registration as a source, as you would a portal.

When a private RFP lands with no earlier signal, mark it as cold in the log. Over a year, the pass rate of cold RFPs against those your account managers flagged early shows you what the account route is worth.

Triage weekly and keep what passes bid/no-bid

Run a short triage once a week that sends every new find either to bid/no-bid, with its source recorded, or out of the log with a one-line reason. Triage isn't the bid/no-bid decision itself; it's the filter in front of it. The triage owner checks each find against the page from the first step - service, country, contract size, timing and capacity - and passes on only those that fit.

Count each find once, under the source that surfaced it first. A contract that appears in a UK1 pipeline, then as a UK2, then on a Find a Tender alert is one find, credited to the pipeline notice. Note the later sightings in the same row, so you don't drop an alert that is your only backstop for buyers who skip early notices.

Then keep a running count per source:

The deciding column is passed bid/no-bid. GCA's market engagement guidance puts the same idea to SMEs: bid strategically for the biggest return on investment. It holds for a team of any size. A source that returns hundreds of notices and sends none to bid/no-bid costs triage time and returns nothing. Once enough bids have closed, read each source's pass rate beside its win rate, so you don't keep a channel whose finds pass but never win.

The decision rule is simple. Keep a source as long as its finds pass bid/no-bid and win. When an alert sends nothing to bid/no-bid across a review period, rewrite its codes and words once, and drop it if the next period ends the same way. Set the review period yourselves, long enough to cover how often buyers in that line publish: a quarter can be too short where they tender once a year. Move the triage owner's time the same way, towards the channels whose finds pass.

In SEQUESTO: Your team asks James, part of SEQUESTO's agentic operating system (aOS), to assess an opportunity that has passed triage once its tender documents are in, and he returns a bid or no-bid recommendation with its reasons, drawn from those documents and your organisation's own information. The bid manager makes the call, and the reasoning stays documented for review.

A checklist for your opportunity search

• Your services, countries, contract sizes, bid/no-bid criteria and quarterly capacity are on one page, and one person owns triage.
• The find log has a source column, and every entry has it filled in.
• You're registered on TED, on Find a Tender and Contracts Finder where you sell in the UK, and on each national or devolved portal your buyers use.
• Each service line has a named alert on each portal, built on codes and buyers' words.
• Your searches return prior information, pipeline and engagement notices as well as tenders.
• Every framework covering your services has its window, or next reopening, logged with a date.
• You've asked the public bodies you target how to join their approved-supplier lists.
• Account managers log RFP signals in the find log when the need is first raised.
• Triage runs weekly, and each alert is reviewed against its passes at the end of every review period.

Your next step is the first weekly triage. Open the find log, fill the source column for everything already in it, and send each find to bid/no-bid or out. Once a find passes, the work moves to the response, and responding to an RFP picks it up from there.