Your agency’s vendor pool grows in one of two ways: either vendors find you, or you find them.
Usually, most of the work is on the supplier. They hear about an opportunity either on your website, in a newspaper announcement, or through a bid aggregation site, find the registration information for a portal or manual sign up, get registered, and start receiving notifications for future opportunities.
This method helps your vendor network grow, but it does so slowly, passively, and potentially unevenly across categories. And the only new organizations that find you are the ones actively looking.
Established and experienced firms who know how the public bidding process works are great. They’re usually reliable, easy to work with, and know the process.
But you may be missing out on more great vendors, simply because they don’t know to look for you or even whether you exist. Regional firms that are unfamiliar with public contracts, specialty contractors who don’t know your agency is putting out RFPs, and disadvantaged businesses that don’t know how to overcome the barriers to entry could all compete, if they only knew how to find you. Those vendors won’t find you on their own. And if your current process makes it difficult for them to register and stay engaged even when they do find you, they won’t stay active for long.
Your agency’s job is to create the conditions that make it easy to discover your opportunities and stay engaged.
If your agency is still managing vendor relationships by tracking registrations in a spreadsheet, sending solicitation notifications by email, and accepting bids in person, the vendor pool problem compounds quickly.
Every manual step in the process leaves an opportunity for a vendor to fall out of the list. Communication issues, staffing changes, notification failures, incorrect category codes, or a lack of confidence in your agency’s processes can all lead to frustrated vendors and a lack of engagement.
The deeper problem is visibility. When your vendor data lives in a spreadsheet and your solicitation history is stored in a filing cabinet or email archive, you can’t easily identify your strongest performing categories, your active versus dormant vendors, or the projects that required a sole-source contracts due to lack of responses. There’s no way to focus vendor development efforts if there’s no organized data to analyze.
Manual processes are also invisible to vendors. If a business has to call hunt around your website or call your office to find out about open solicitations, email a form or documentation to register, and wait for a phone call to confirm, most will not bother – especially smaller businesses without a dedicated development staff. The registration barrier alone filters out a significant share of the qualified vendors who could be competing for your contracts.
Still managing vendors with spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls? Your manual procurement processes could be costing you more than you think while keeping your active network small. Check out this article, "Do You Need a Vendor Management System? Here's How to Know" in the Learning Center to see if your agency could benefit from a centralized and connected digital procurement platform.
Whether your agency manages vendors manually or through a digital procurement system portal, the vendors outside your current network aren’t receiving your notifications if they’re not registered.
And they haven’t registered for any of a number of reasons: they don’t know your agency is releasing solicitations, or they registration process was too complicated, or they tried once and ran into an issue, or they’ve never been given a reason to engage with your agency.
This doesn’t mean there’s a lack of qualified vendors in your market, but rather that there’s a gap between the vendor pool you’ve built up and the pool you could be working from. That gap is what leads to non-competitive bids and sole-source procurements, but it’s also your best opportunity to improve competition.
The most efficient way to expand your vendor pool isn’t cold outreach to businesses that haven’t ever worked with government customers. The fastest and easiest way to find new suppliers is to reach out to those who are already active in public work. They’re familiar with the bidding processes, already oriented toward government work, and ready to engage with a new agency.
These vendors have already cleared the biggest hurdle: they understand how public procurement works and are set up to participate. When you invite them to register and bid with your agency, there’s no new process to learn, just another agency to add to their potential client list.
For agencies managing vendors manually, identifying these vendors requires outreach efforts like attending regional events, connecting with peer agencies for references, or reaching out to trade associations in the relevant categories. It’s doable but time-consuming, and the results are difficult to sustain without a more systematic approach.
It’s an easier process with a platform that allows you to connect with other agencies’ vendors automatically. PlanetBids’ digital procurement platform, for example, can connect you to a broader network of relevant suppliers from around your area or those that do similar work for other connected agencies. You can search for vendors active in specific categories, identify qualified suppliers you haven’t worked with, and invite them to register, all within the same system in which they’re already active. Your notifications for new opportunities will appear alongside all the agencies they’re already working with, and they won’t have to learn a new system or process to bid.
Finding vendors who could be in your pool is only half the work. The other half is making sure they complete registration when invited.
If registering requires a phone call, a paper form, an in-person visit, or more than a few minutes of their day, a significant share of the vendors you invite won’t follow through. They’re busy, and the time and effort registration takes may not be worth it for a single opportunity.
If you’re agency is still operating manually, it’s worth examining your registration and notification process to understand all the potential pinch points or frustrations that could cause a potential vendor to bail without completing. If your process involves lots of steps, manual follow-up, or waiting for confirmation, you could be missing out on qualified vendors, and you’d never know it because of the lack of data.
A vendor portal removes those pain points by allowing vendors to register and upload documents, easily select categories, and immediately enroll in bid notifications. Vendors can register once, in a few minutes, and get notifications for as long as they want. That experience keeps vendors engaged over time, rather than registering once and then fading away.
One of the most underused supplier discovery tools you have is the list of vendors who received a solicitation notification but didn’t respond.
When a solicitation closes with three responses out of several dozen sent, the natural focus is on the three who submitted. But the more valuable question is why the others did not.
Non-participation surveys can bring forward specific, actionable information about what is keeping qualified vendors out of the process. Maybe the scope was unclear or the specifications felt too restrictive, or the timeline didn’t leave room to prepare a responsive bid. Maybe the notification arrived too late or the submission process itself was too cumbersome to be worth the effort.
For manual procurement teams, a cumbersome bid submission process is just as limiting as a difficult registration process. If a vendor must print multiple copies, bring a digital copy, sign tons of paperwork, and drive to a government office to drop off a sealed envelope by a certain date and time, you’ve automatically excluded many small firms or those that are outside your immediate geographical area, limiting your reach, your category depth, and your competition, the same as a frustrating manual registration process is doing.
Every response to a non-participation survey should provide something your agency can address. Make it a standard step after every solicitation that comes back with fewer responses than expected. The vendors who respond are telling you exactly what needs to change to get their participation next time.
For some categories, the vendor market may genuinely be thin if the vendors are not concentrated locally. Specialty construction, certain technology services, and niche professional services categories often have stronger vendor markets regionally or nationally than they do at the local level.
For those categories, geographic outreach matters. If your solicitation process requires in-person registration or submission or relies on vendors who are aware of a local newspaper notice, you’re limiting your competitive pool to vendors with a very narrow radius. Moving to a process where solicitations are accessible online, registration is smooth, and bids are submitted digitally immediately expands your geographic reach without requiring any additional outreach effort. Vendors counties or states away can find and respond to solicitations just as easily as a local supplier.
Attracting strong vendor participation is an ongoing part of procurement operations. Monitoring participation trends, reaching out to new vendors between solicitations, following up when vendors don’t respond, and continuously lowering the barriers to engagement should not be efforts you focus on once a year.
If you’re still operating with manual processes like spreadsheets and newspaper announcements, the single most impactful change you can make is moving to a digital procurement platform that features a clear, easy-to-use vendor portal for solicitation notification and bid submittal. This technology is the smartest, easiest way to make supplier discovery and vendor engagement sustainable consistent and scalable.
Manual processes require manual effort at every step, and that effort will always compete with active solicitations for your team’s time. A system like PlanetBids that handles registration, sends out automatic notifications, logs participation, and connects you to a broader network makes vendor outreach sustainable, rather than perpetually deferred.