Pre-Market Engagement: The PIN Race

The Race That Begins Before You Know It Has Started

There is a moment in most procurement processes that feels like the starting gun. The notice appears on Find a Tender or drops into your inbox and the clock starts. Deadline. Requirements. Fixed time. Best bid. Go!    

But what if that moment is not the starting gun at all? What if, by the time that notice appears, a significant chunk of the race has already been run and some of your competitors have been on the track for the better part of two years?  Not a hypothetical. Increasingly, that is just how complex public procurement works under the Competitive Flexible Procedure and it is one of the most important things any SME needs to understand if winning public sector work is on the agenda for their growth.

From PINs To Market Engagement Notices: A Brief History Of Being Left Out

Contracting authorities have always had the ability to publish Prior Information Notices, or PINs. In theory, a PIN is a useful early signal that a procurement is on its way, giving the market time to prepare and taking the edge off those frenzied, compressed timescales that have historically done smaller suppliers no favours at all.  In practice, PINs were used sporadically at best. Some authorities published them routinely, others barely bothered and even when they did appear, the information was often thin. A PIN might confirm that a contract was coming and roughly when, but it rarely told you anything useful about scope, structure or what the authority actually wanted to achieve. For SMEs without the capacity to track dozens of pipelines simultaneously, PINs were easy to miss and, when found, not always worth very much. A scheduling heads-up. Nothing more.

What we are seeing now under the Procurement Act 2023 and the CFP is something qualitatively different. Market engagement notices are emerging more reliably and more substantively and the intent behind them has genuinely shifted. This is not a scheduling signal. It is an invitation to participate in shaping the procurement before it formally begins.  That is rather a bigger deal than it might sound.

Co-Designing The Contract You Will Later Be Asked To Win

The language around market engagement under the CFP is significant. Authorities are not simply consulting the market on whether they have got the timing right. In the more sophisticated procurements they are inviting suppliers to contribute to the design of scope, key performance indicators and in some cases the award methodology itself.  Think about what that means in practice. Engage meaningfully at this stage and you have the opportunity to ensure the requirements actually reflect operational reality or the KPIs are ones a capable supplier can genuinely deliver.

That is an extraordinary opportunity. It is also one that the majority of SMEs either do not know about or do not take seriously enough to act on. Both of which are, frankly, a shame. Early engagement often shapes the competitive field long before a tender is formally launched. By the time a contract notice appears on Find a Tender, some suppliers may already have spent months engaging with the authority through prior information notices, requests for information, supplier events or other forms of pre-procurement dialogue. That early contact does not displace the principles of transparency or equal treatment, and it does not guarantee success. It does, however, give engaged suppliers a materially better understanding of the authority’s priorities, the emerging structure of the requirement and the commercial logic behind the eventual procurement documents.

A good illustration is the NHS Shared Business Services procurement for Patient Communication & Engagement Solutions 2. The authority published a prior information notice in October 2024, followed by a request for information and meetings with potential suppliers, before the competition moved into formal tender stage in 2025. The authority was careful to record that this preliminary market engagement had not created an unfair advantage or distorted competition. Even so, the example shows the practical reality: suppliers who had taken part in that earlier engagement were likely to reach the live procurement with a much clearer sense of the authority’s direction of travel than those encountering the opportunity only once it was published on the portal.

That is the real commercial significance of early engagement. In most cases, the advantage is not overt and it is rarely unlawful. It lies instead in familiarity: knowing which issues matter most to the client, which delivery concerns are likely to drive evaluation, how the requirement has evolved and where the authority may still be open to clarification or refinement. When the procurement formally opens, all bidders may be responding to the same published documents, but they are not always doing so from the same starting point.

For suppliers, the lesson is straightforward. Waiting for the tender notice is often waiting too late. The businesses best placed to compete are usually those that track pipeline notices, respond to requests for information, attend market engagement events and invest time in understanding an authority’s objectives before the procurement reaches the formal competition stage. In that sense, public procurement is not simply won through tender writing once the notice goes live. By that stage, the requirement may already have been tested, refined and better understood by those suppliers who engaged early. Those who wait for the published notice can find themselves fighting on someone else’s spec.

What It Actually Means To Fight On Someone Else’s Spec

It’s worth dwelling on that phrase for a moment.  When a contracting authority has conducted extensive pre-market engagement and then publishes a formal tender, the requirements do not emerge from thin air. They reflect the conversations that took place before the formal process began. The language used to describe the scope carries the fingerprints of the suppliers who helped develop it. The KPIs reflect what those suppliers said was measurable and meaningful. The award criteria reflect what the authority came to believe, through those conversations, was most important to assess.  None of that is necessarily improper. The Act permits and, in many ways, encourages pre-market engagement and there are rules designed to prevent suppliers who participated from gaining an unfair advantage in the formal process. But rules and reality are not always perfectly aligned and the practical effect is that suppliers who were in the room understand the brief at a fundamentally deeper level than those who were not.

Arrive at the tender stage without that background and you are not just starting later. You are starting with less. Less context, less insight into what the authority truly values, less understanding of the history and thinking that produced the specification you are now trying to respond to. Your response may be technically competent and perfectly well written, but it will not carry the weight of genuine understanding and evaluators, even without consciously recognising it, tend to score responses that demonstrate real engagement with the context more highly than those that do not.  You can write a brilliant response to the wrong brief. It rarely wins.

Getting On The Radar Before The Engagement Even Starts

Here is where it gets even more demanding. Because waiting for the full ITT to be released and then responding to it is still, when you think about it, a fairly reactive posture. The suppliers who consistently perform best in complex public procurement are the ones who have built relationships with key clients before any formal engagement mechanism is in place. This is not about circumventing the rules. The Procurement Act is clear that contracting authorities must manage pre-market engagement transparently and ensure it does not distort competition. What it is about is the entirely legitimate business of understanding your market, knowing which authorities are likely to procure in your area of expertise and when, building a reputation and a presence in the conversations that shape those decisions, and ensuring that when a market engagement notice does appear, you are not discovering the opportunity for the first time.

Getting on a client’s radar might mean attending sector events and conferences where commissioning teams are present. It might mean responding to published consultations on strategy or service design. It might mean requesting a briefing meeting with a procurement team or commissioner to understand their forward pipeline, which authorities are generally willing to arrange. It might mean contributing to published reviews or inquiries where your expertise is relevant. None of these activities are unusual or improper and all of them serve the dual purpose of building your profile with potential clients and deepening your understanding of the opportunities you might later want to pursue.

Building Pre-Bid Activity Into Your Business Planning

There is a dimension to all this that SMEs frequently overlook, which is what taking pre-market engagement seriously actually costs in terms of time and resource.  If you treat a bid as something that begins when the notice appears and ends when the submission is made, your business planning reflects that. Bid activity is reactive, unpredictable in its timing and thoroughly disruptive to normal operations because it tends to arrive suddenly and demand your immediate attention regardless of what else you are supposed to be doing that week.  

If instead you build pre-bid activity into your forward plan, the picture looks quite different. You know which opportunities you are tracking. You know which market engagement processes are live or approaching. You have allocated time and resource to participate in those processes properly. When the formal tender eventually drops, you are not scrambling to clear your diary and pull together a team at short notice. You are implementing a plan you already built.

For a smaller business, this kind of discipline is genuinely transformative. Bid activity stops feeling like a crisis. The quality of your engagement at every stage is higher because it is planned rather than panicked. And when you arrive at the formal tender stage, you have something that money and headcount cannot easily buy: context, relationships and genuine understanding of what you are being asked to deliver. Pipeline notices published on Find a Tender under the Procurement Act 2023 are one tool for this kind of forward planning.

Authorities are expected to be more transparent about their upcoming procurement activity and while the pipeline information is not always as detailed or as timely as suppliers would like, it is a starting point. Combine it with your own sector knowledge, your existing client relationships and a disciplined approach to monitoring market engagement notices, and you begin to build a picture of where the opportunities are and what you need to do to be ready for them.

Levelling The Playing Field

There is a common perception, not entirely without foundation, that public procurement favours larger suppliers. They have more resources, more bid infrastructure, longer track records and more capacity to absorb the cost of pursuing complex opportunities. Market engagement, handled well, has the potential to partially address that imbalance. The CFP’s emphasis on dialogue, co-design and iterative engagement is genuinely more hospitable to smaller suppliers than the old sealed-bid, single-shot processes that rewarded those who could throw the most resource at a submission in the shortest possible time.

However – that potential is only realised if SMEs engage with it. The uncomfortable truth is that the playing field is levelled at the market engagement stage, and then it tilts again in favour of those who showed up. A large supplier that participates actively in eighteen months of pre-market engagement and a small supplier that does the same arrive at the formal tender on essentially equal footing. A small supplier that does not engage arrives at a structural disadvantage that is very difficult to overcome with even the most accomplished written bid.  The CFP gives SMEs the tools to compete. It does not automatically use those tools on their behalf.

How Complete Tenders Gets You In Early

Complete Tenders’ work with SMEs does not begin when the tender notice appears. It begins much earlier, because that is where the competitive ground is laid through our structured Partnership Agreements that help clients engage sooner, prepare more strategically and position themselves before the opportunity goes live. Complete Tenders tracks procurement pipelines and market engagement activity across relevant sectors, giving clients early visibility of opportunities that are approaching rather than ones that have already been published.

Where market engagement notices are live, we help you prepare and submit responses that are substantive, well-positioned and demonstrate the kind of genuine engagement that builds credibility with commissioning teams.  On the question of getting on the client radar before formal engagement begins, Complete Tenders can help you identify the right events, the right forums and the right conversations to be in, ensuring your participation is purposeful rather than simply a presence.

Knowing who to talk to and what to say is a skill and it is absolutely one that can be developed and supported.  When it comes to building pre-bid activity into your business planning, Complete Tenders works with clients to create a forward view of bid opportunity, resource requirements and engagement timelines that turns reactive bidding into proactive strategy. The businesses that win consistently are the ones that plan consistently and that planning has to start earlier than most people think.

The Contract Notice Is Not The Beginning

If you wait for the contract notice to appear before you start thinking seriously about an opportunity, you are already on the back foot. That is not meant to be discouraging. It is simply an accurate reflection of where competitive advantage is really built and, therefore, a clear guide to where you need to be looking for it. The market engagement stage is real, it is consequential and under the CFP it is becoming more structured and more influential with every procurement cycle. The suppliers who treat it seriously, who show up early, engage substantively and build their understanding of the opportunity long before the formal process begins, are the ones who arrive at the tender stage with a genuine edge.

Contact Complete Tenders today and find out how to build a bid strategy that starts at the right point, which is considerably earlier than most people realise.