TenderScout SaaS scouts public sector opportunities for your business

by Startacus Admin

A key area that many a startup and small business struggle at, is finding the time to search for public sector and government tendering opportunities. If you do then find the time to search for those opportunities, it can then be a minefield to find the right opportunities for your actual business.

And, after all that (phew) and you’ve found that said ‘opportunity’, having the patience to deal with the complexities involved in applying - and no offence to public sector websites, but they often don’t make it very easy...

If only there was a software as a service company that could do that job for you….and apply data science to make sure the leads were quantified to your business's capabilities...

Step forward SaaS startup TenderScout, an multi-award winning Irish startup that aims to finds qualified business-to-government opportunities and builds business-to-business prospect pipelines for small and mid-market businesses increasing win-rates and improving sales pipeline quality.

Their latest accolades came at the 2016 eir Spider Awards, awarded with both best digital startup and the coveted Grand Prix Award. With this in mind, we thought it about time to give TenderScout some much deserved Startacus airtime to share all on their innovative SaaS product. We chatted to CEO Tony Corrigan to find out more...

We love the sound of Tenderscout, but for anyone who doesn't know, can you tell us about your business and the problem you aim to solve?

TenderScout enables business to compete for and win government and private sector contracts by using technology that takes care of all the complexities of the process, so that business can focus on their unique value proposition. Many businesses find reading RFPs and worse, writing proposals to be something that they're just not equipped for. This lack of ability in 'tendering' means that they never win the contracts that they're superbly qualified to deliver on.

What do you think puts startups and SMEs off from applying for public sector contracts?

Public sector contracting is shrouded in specialised jargon and  lack of transparency. Just figuring out what the buyer is looking for, if the buyer even knows themselves takes more time and expertise than the average company can invest. There is a perception that the process favours 'big companies', even though the facts (and we spend a lot of time separating fact from fiction) show that something like 80% of contracts are won by small and medium sized companies. In short it's fear of the unknown that stops startups and SMEs from winning contracts that they're more than capability of executing on.

How does Tenderscout find and qualify government and public sector contracts to the clients that use your software?

We scan public data sources all over the world and use machine learning algorithms to analyse up to 7,000 new opportunities each day. We infer future outcomes, predict winners and our clients likelihood of success, based on past performances and our clients track record. It means that our clients can make data-driven decisions about what proposals that should write.

More generally about SaaS businesses - what impact is software technology having, in changing the way that sales teams do both business development and pipeline sales?

Technology and in particular predictive analytics are shaping the future of sales. Companies like insidesales, salesforce, infer, datahug, leadspace and countless more are developing solutions across the entire sales process from predictive calling, lead generation, lead qualification and so on. Many of these solutions rely on CRMs or determining buyer sentiment using website analytics. We're using the outcomes of 2.9million government competitions to direct our clients towards the opportunities that they're most likely to win, increasing their sales team effectiveness. 

As a business you are based both in Belfast and Dublin - how much does it help being based in both in NI and ROI, and will BREXIT have an impact on how you operate your business?

The UK is responsible for 25% of all European tenders, so there is an impact for companies competing for UK contracts but also competing outside of the UK. In practice it's a small % of companies that do compete outside their national borders and typically they're competing all over the world. For the majority of our clients, BREXIT won't have any real impact on the business that they're competing for and so I don't feel it'll impact us particularly.   

Tell us what is next for Tenderscout - any news or recent updates you can share with Startacus?

We've just closed funding with Growing Capital leading the round. We've been incredibly focussed on improving Monthly Recurring Revenues (MRR) in North America and this investment will enable us to really go for that market. We're close to a partnership with a bid consultancy, who will be able to help our clients get the best value out of the technology. And we're recruiting data scientists and sales development reps, while constantly seeking to build out our management team, so if you know anybody looking to be part of the next chapter in the story.....

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• #irish startup
• #tenderscout
• #public sector
• #tender
• #tendering
• #saas
• #software as a service
• #
• #brexit
• #predictive analytics
• #machine learning
• #data science
• #tony corrigan

Published on: 15th March 2017