Marketplace Solicitation / Development
Communicating your requirement to potential suppliers
This stage involves taking the requirement out to the marketplace and identifying the level of interest in the business. Market solicitation is sometimes called soft market testing or market development.
The key part of this process is producing appropriate bid documentation. Depending on your requirements, this could take the form of:
- An invitation to tender
- A request for information
- A request for pricing
- An enquiry
Bid documentation is a method of explaining to suppliers what is required in varying degrees of depth which should be a correlation of the value and complexity of the requirement.
Advertisements are then placed in appropriate journals, papers and web sites as well as other means of advising suppliers of the requirement. Your purchasing and supply team should also proactively identify and contact interesting suppliers with the objective of encouraging them to see your business as attractive and put forward their offers.
Where suppliers cannot be identified to meet the requirement it may be necessary to develop suppliers to meet the need by encouraging them to move into new markets. This is sometimes known as reverse marketing.
The objective of this stage is to have a number of suppliers sufficiently enthusiastic about your requirement to prepare their individual offers.
