One of the services available to active* clients of the Montana PTAC is our bid match service. If you (or anyone at your company) is spending a lot of time visiting procurement websites, looking for RFPs, RFQs or IFBs, this service can be a real time-saver. Our bid match service monitors hundreds of websites where city, county, state, and federal government agencies post solicitations. Opportunities that look like a good match for your company’s capabilities are automatically emailed to you in a daily digest.
While subscribing to this service might seem like a no-brainer, there are some instances where it doesn’t make sense. Here are a few examples:
- If the pricing of your products or services is such that any purchase isn’t likely to exceed the threshold requiring a public solicitation, you probably won’t get any matches.
- If you are only focused on federal contracting opportunities and you already have effective search agents set up in FedBizOpps, subscribing to our bid match service would be redundant.
- Similarly, if you are only focused on selling to the State of Montana and you feel good about the commodity codes you have selected in eMACS, subscribing to our bid match service would be redundant.
- If the government agencies you are targeting do not post their solicitations online, or our bid match vendor is unable to monitor the website they use to post their solicitations, you won’t get any matches.
If none of these things apply to you, and you think you would benefit from our bid match service, make an appointment with your local PTAC counselor. He or she will work with you to come up with a search profile that defines the kinds of opportunities you want to see. This will mostly be based on keywords, but NAICS codes and/or product/service codes can be used where appropriate. You can indicate whether you want to see federal opportunities, state and local opportunities, or subcontracting opportunities, and you can even restrict your search geographically, if you’d like.
Your bid match service will be active within one business day of submitting your search profile. Then, on days when matches are found, you will receive an email with “mybidmatch.com” in the subject line. Each matching solicitation listed in the email digest will include a product/service category code, the title of the solicitation, and the agency that posted it. To get more information about any of the opportunities, the fastest path is to click on the hyperlinked date. Next, click on the title of the solicitation you are interested in. That will take you to the abstract of the solicitation. There is a link at the bottom of each abstract that will take you to the original solicitation at the source.
If you already subscribe to our bid match service, but you haven’t reviewed your search profile in a while, now would be a good time to set up an appointment with your PTAC counselor to do that. Our bid match service is most effective with ongoing refinement of your search profile. It’s rare that we are able to get a search profile totally dialed in on the first shot, especially when we are building it from scratch. A poorly-designed search profile results in bad matches, which you have to filter through. We want this service to be a time-saver. Another reason to set up a review of your search profile is that businesses change over time. We want to make sure that your search profile keeps up with those changes. Maybe you’re carrying different products now, or you’ve acquired new machinery that expands your capabilities. Whatever the case may be, check in with your PTAC counselor. You’ll be glad you did.
* We do not charge a fee for our bid match service, but it is not free to us. That is why we only offer it to our active clients. If you have any questions about whether or not you qualify, speak with your PTAC counselor.