Happy Little Christmas Eve, Connectors!
Welcome back to the Mercell Advent Calendar, where we share valuable information and best practices from us here at Mercell.
This week, we’ll be sharing a summary of our 24 Days of Mercell from LinkedIn. If you didn’t know, we’ve been posting a daily dose of insights and tips from Mercell on our LinkedIn page during the month of December. Today we’re sharing the very best of these to keep you informed about public procurement trends and set you up for business success.
As the end of the year is coming up, now is the perfect time to prepare for next year’s procurements. According to our data, March is usually the busiest month for public procurement in Scandinavia. Around 13% of all tenders published happen around March. December is a great time to strategically plan next year’s public sales but checking public contracts ending in 2025.
And speaking of next year: did you know that summer is not as quiet as you might think! Although July and August are vacation months for a lot of companies, they also account for around 7% of annual tenders published each month. It might be worth keeping an eye out during the summer to avoid missed opportunities.
Our data also shows that proactive suppliers win more business. Over 40% of public tenders received just a single bid in the year of 2021. We’ve also seen that the average number of bidders per tender halved during the ten year span between 2011 and 2021, dropping from 5.7 to 3.2 average number of bidders per tender. This means there’s now less competition, not to mention a greater chance for your bids to stand out. There’s also greater opportunities for new suppliers to enter the market!
Another thing we’ve noticed is that public buys will often reuse the same tender criteria. If you’re a supplier, you can start preparing for upcoming tenders by reviewing past tender documents on platforms like Mercell. This will not only increase your chances of success, but also help you save time in the future.
Finally, it’s important to note that nearly 50% of tenders focus on the best quality-price ratio, and not just the lowest price. This is something we’ve seen after analyzing over 100,000 tender evaluation criteria across the Nordics over the last 3 years.
So how to take advantage of all these insights? Right now, you can find over 1000+ below-threshold tenders across Mercell platforms. Most public business happens below national threshold and so aren’t required to be published. These hidden opportunities can be difficult to find, but can be explored with Mercell!
A lot of tenders lack critical details, making it difficult for suppliers to find the right opportunities. Our data ensures Mercell customers discover the right tenders, creating more opportunities for both buyers and suppliers. In 2024, Mercell enriched tenders with over 1,000,000 data points to help buyers and suppliers achieve better matching.
Mercell’s embedded AI can also help you assess which tenders are relevant to you and your business. With this new feature you can save time to focus on writing great bids instead of sifting through complicated tenders.
That’s it for the Mercell Advent Calendar this year! We hope you’ve gained some valuable knowledge from this series of articles that you can use in your future procurements. Don’t forget you can also check out our previous articles in the Mercell Community.