How many early market engagement opportunities is your team missing right now — because you didn’t know they existed?
Procurement regulations, public contracts regulations, and other legislation set the legal frameworks governing procurement notices and processes. The Procurement Act 2023 has come into effect on February 24, 2025, replacing Prior Information Notices with Planned Procurement Notices.
Most suppliers manually monitor multiple procurement portals and miss critical early signals because there’s no single source of truth. They enter bids late in the cycle, after competitors have already shaped buyer requirements and positioned themselves as preferred suppliers. The result? Lower shortlist rates, weaker competitive positioning, and missed opportunities to influence procurement scope.
Under the Procurement Act 2023, buyers—referred to as contracting authorities—are publishing more preliminary market engagement (PME) notices and planned procurement notices earlier than ever before. The Procurement Act 2023 specifies different types of procurement notices that must be published for procurement processes starting on or after 24 February 2025. Contracting authorities are responsible for publishing notices at the pre procurement stage to inform suppliers about upcoming procurement. Planned procurement notices should include as much information as possible about upcoming procurement, even if details are limited at early stages, and contracting authorities are not obligated to follow up a Planned Procurement Notice with a tender notice. PME is not mandatory, but it is recommended as part of the preparation for a future contract. The Procurement Act 2023 includes legislative requirements for PME for contracts exceeding the relevant threshold. PME helps contracting authorities and the market prepare for procurement by allowing significant flexibility in designing competitive procurement procedures. The information gathered during PME can be critical when developing a business case, procurement strategy, specification of requirements, and tender documentation.
These notices and early engagement activities are intended to help procurement practitioners and commercial policy leads align the procurement process with commercial policy and official guidance. Technical guidance and commercial policy leads provide technical guidance to procurement practitioners to ensure compliance and best practice under the new regime.
This guide explains what early market engagement signals exist, why real-time alerts matter, how procurement tools centralise fragmented notice sources, and how to convert early signals into wins.
Understanding Market Engagement
Market engagement refers to buyer-led activities designed to test supplier capability, understand market appetite, and shape procurement requirements before the formal tender is released. These include soft market tests, questionnaires, supplier days, focus groups, and capability interviews — all conducted months before the Request for Tender (RFT) or Request for Proposal (RFP) is published. Early Market Engagement (EME) and Preliminary Market Engagement (PME) help buyers and suppliers reduce uncertainties and improve market intelligence, particularly for complex or high-value procurements. EME is regarded as best practice, especially for complex or high-value procurements, as it allows buyers to engage with potential suppliers early and gather valuable insights. Thorough preparation, including market intelligence gathering and supplier engagement, is essential for a successful procurement process.
Why does early engagement shape bid outcomes so dramatically? Suppliers who engage early understand buyer pain points, can tailor their approach to align with buyer expectations, and directly influence tender requirements. They’re shortlisted at significantly higher rates because the tender is effectively written around their proposed solutions. Maintaining competition and a level playing field during the market engagement process is crucial to ensure fair participation among all suppliers and avoid market distortion. Strong engagement acts as a “secret sauce” that competitors cannot easily replicate, as it is based on trust and shared values.
Consider a real example: A healthcare IT supplier attends a buyer’s supplier day for a digital transformation programme. During the event, they identify the buyer’s core challenge — legacy systems integration across multiple NHS Trusts. They propose a phased implementation that minimises disruption. When the formal tender is released three months later, their proposal aligns perfectly with buyer expectations. They win a £2M contract. Hosting “meet the buyer” events helps businesses understand market capabilities, leading to better specifications and value for money.
The timeline matters. Soft market testing typically begins three to six months before formal tender. Preliminary market engagement notices follow two to four months before. Prior Information Notices (PINs) appear one to three months before, and Planned Procurement Notices signal one to two months ahead. Suppliers who engage early gain six to twelve months of advance intelligence — time to build relationships, understand requirements, and position strategically. Identifying potential suppliers and the process to identify suppliers is a crucial step in procurement, ensuring a diverse and suitable supplier base is considered.
The competitive advantage is quantifiable. Suppliers who engage during preliminary market engagement are 2.5x more likely to be shortlisted than those who don’t, with shortlist rates of 40–60% compared to 10–20% for non-engaged suppliers. Effective market engagement in competitive industries focuses on building emotional loyalty through personalized experiences. Emotional connections between consumers and brands often outlast price-based competition in crowded markets. Early engagement also enables resource planning, pipeline forecasting, and informed bid/no-bid decisions — avoiding costly, low-probability pursuits.
Why Early Alerts Matter
Real-time alerts compress response windows from days to hours. A buyer publishes a preliminary market engagement notice on Monday morning. Your competitor receives an alert, responds to the questionnaire by Tuesday, and registers for the supplier day by Wednesday. Your team doesn’t discover the opportunity until Friday. You’ve lost the chance to influence the buyer’s thinking.
Procurement tools solve this. Real-time alerts enable response within 48 hours instead of two to three days — critical because engagement slots fill quickly, questionnaire deadlines are often tight, and early responders typically receive more detailed feedback from buyers.
Beyond speed, early alerts provide pipeline visibility. Instead of reacting to formal tenders, you can forecast demand six to twelve months ahead, identify which buyers are moving to market, and allocate resources strategically. Early engagement also provides qualification advantage — suppliers who respond to questionnaires and attend supplier days shape buyer requirements and are more likely to be shortlisted because the tender reflects their capabilities.
The data supports this. As of December 2025, more than 53,000 notices and awards have been published under the Procurement Act 2023 across approximately 3,000 active buying organisations. Suppliers using systematic alert tools to filter this volume are significantly more likely to identify and respond to relevant opportunities. Those using early engagement tools report 30–40% higher shortlist rates, 20–30% higher win rates, and 50% faster response times compared to manual monitoring.
The Core Early Signals
Three notice types signal early buyer intent. Monitoring all three gives you a complete picture of the procurement landscape.
Preliminary Market Engagement Notices invite suppliers to participate in market sounding, questionnaires, or supplier days. They reveal the buyer’s initial thinking on scope, budget, timeline, and key requirements before specifications are finalised. Respond honestly, attend supplier days, and ask clarifying questions rather than overselling. Suppliers who respond are 2.5x more likely to be shortlisted.
Prior Information Notices (PINs) provide advance notice of planned procurement — buyer intent, estimated budget, timeline, framework details, and procurement scope. Published one to three months before formal tender, they allow you to shape your capture strategy well in advance. Use PINs to identify which buyers are moving to market, assess fit, begin relationship building, and inform pipeline forecasting.
Planned Procurement Notices are formal advance notices of upcoming procurements, increasingly required under the Procurement Act 2023. Published one to two months before formal tender, they are your bid/no-bid trigger. Once published, you have limited time to decide whether to pursue the opportunity — which is why early intelligence from preliminary engagement and PINs is so valuable.
The three notice types work together: preliminary engagement reveals buyer thinking, PINs confirm intent and provide budget detail, and Planned Procurement Notices signal imminent tender release.
What Tools Provide Early Alerts?
The challenge is clear: notices are scattered across Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, buyer websites, LinkedIn, and email. No single source of truth. Suppliers spend two to three hours per day searching multiple portals and still miss opportunities.
Specialised procurement tools solve this by aggregating notices from multiple sources, deduplicating, enriching with buyer intelligence, and pushing configurable alerts to users and teams. Core features include multi-source aggregation (Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, buyer websites, soft market tests), real-time notifications via email, dashboard, and mobile within minutes of publication, enrichment with CPV codes, buyer financial health, sector intelligence, estimated budgets and contact details, and filtering by keywords, regions, sectors, budget ranges, buyer types, and notice types. Collaboration features ensure team accountability, and reporting dashboards track pipeline, response rates, shortlist rates, and win rates.
The comparison with manual monitoring is stark. Manual search takes two to three hours per day, generates 50+ irrelevant notices per week, and results in two to three day response times. Procurement tools require 15 minutes per week setting up alerts, deliver three to five relevant notices per week, and compress response time to under one hour. The business case is compelling: 10+ hours saved per week, response rates of 70%+ versus 30%, shortlist rates of 40–60% versus 10–20%, and win rate uplift of 20–30%.
DCI Contracts centralises early market engagement signals across all sources, enriches them with buyer intelligence and CPV codes, and delivers configurable real-time alerts — so teams respond within hours instead of days.
How DCI Contracts Accelerates Early Engagement
DCI Contracts aggregates notices from Contracts Finder, Find a Tender, buyer websites, soft market tests, and other sources into a single procurement portal, eliminating the need to jump between platforms. Every notice is enriched with CPV codes, buyer financial health, sector intelligence, estimated budgets, and buyer contact details — saving hours of manual research.
Configurable alerts form the operational core. Filter by keywords (market engagement, PINs, preliminary engagement notices), CPV/category, regions, budget ranges, and buyer types, receiving only relevant notices in real time. Dashboards track early engagement pipeline, response rates, shortlist rates, and win rates, enabling you to identify which notice types drive your highest shortlist rates and which buyer types are most likely to shortlist you.
Collaboration features ensure no opportunity is missed. Share alerts across bid teams, assign actions, track responses, and document buyer feedback to build institutional knowledge. The platform also captures variant spellings — saving keyword lists for “early engagement” (a common misspelling) alongside “early engagement” to avoid missing opportunities due to buyer typos.
Practical example: A bid manager sets up an alert for “market engagement” + “healthcare” + “£500k–£2M” budget. Instead of 50+ irrelevant notices per week, they receive three to five highly relevant opportunities. Response time drops from two to three days to under one hour. Within six months, response rates improve from 30% to 70% and shortlist rates increase from 15% to 45%.
Setting Up Effective Alerts
Building targeted alerts in DCI Contracts takes minutes. Navigate to Saved Searches and create a new search with a descriptive name (e.g., “Healthcare Market Engagement £500k–£2M”). Define filters for keywords (“market engagement,” “preliminary engagement,” “supplier day,” “questionnaire,” “soft market test”), notice types (preliminary market engagement notices, PINs, planned procurement notices), CPV codes relevant to your sector, regions, budget ranges, and buyer types. Set alert frequency, assign team members, save and activate.
Start broad, then refine based on the first month’s results. Aim for five to fifteen relevant notices per week — not 50+ noise. A healthcare IT supplier might filter for “healthcare” + “digital transformation” + CPV 72 (IT services) + £1M–£5M budget and receive eight to twelve relevant opportunities per month. A construction supplier filtering for “construction” + CPV 45 + all UK regions + £2M–£10M might receive ten to fifteen. Start with three to five saved searches covering your core markets, monitor results for two weeks, and adjust filters based on relevance.
Converting Early Engagement into Wins
Receiving alerts is only the first step. Converting early signals into wins requires a systematic playbook.
Respond within 48 hours. Answer questionnaires promptly and register for supplier days immediately — early responders are remembered and are often included in follow-up deep-dive sessions with buyer procurement teams that delayed responders miss. Have a capabilities statement ready: a one to two page summary of relevant experience, approach, and differentiators that can be quickly customised for each questionnaire.
At supplier days, ask thoughtful questions about buyer pain points, budget constraints, timeline, and evaluation criteria. Listen more than you pitch. Document everything — buyer feedback, competitive landscape, key contacts, and next steps — and share it with your bid team. When documenting buyer feedback, close the feedback loop by publicly acknowledging customer feedback and informing them of related product improvements. Use early signals to inform your bid/no-bid decision: is the fit strong, can you resource it, is the margin acceptable? When engaging with buyers, it is important to avoid giving any supplier an unfair advantage during the procurement process to maintain fairness and integrity.
Common mistakes to avoid: ignoring preliminary engagement notices, responding late to questionnaires, failing to attend supplier days, not documenting intelligence, and treating early engagement as separate from bid strategy.
Metrics to track: response time (target under 48 hours), attendance rate at relevant supplier days (target 80%+), shortlist rate (target 40–60%), and win rate for engaged opportunities (target 20–30%).
In terms of compliance and transparency, good practice includes the use of transparency notices and procurement termination notices to keep the market informed and ensure openness in public procurement. When award decisions are made, be aware of the concept of direct award and the procedural requirements for publishing transparency notices both before and after making a direct award.
Measuring ROI
Track these KPIs to evidence the value of early engagement: time-to-alert (target under 30 minutes), response rate (target 70%+), shortlist rate (benchmark 40–60%), win rate uplift (typical 20–30%), and total pipeline value (six to twelve month forward view).
The ROI calculation is straightforward: 100 early engagement notices → 70 responses → 28 shortlists → 8 wins → £8M revenue at £1M average contract value. Without early engagement, you’d win two to three of those 100 opportunities (£2–3M). That’s £5–6M incremental revenue attributable to early engagement. DCI Contracts dashboards surface these metrics by stage — alert received, response sent, shortlisted, won — so you can present clear evidence to leadership rather than guessing at impact.
To see what DCI could mean for your business, use the DCI ROI Calculator. Input your current bid volume, win rate, and average contract value, and the calculator will show you the tangible revenue impact of switching to systematic, intelligence-led procurement tracking. For many suppliers, the result makes the decision straightforward.
Compliance and Ethical Considerations
Early engagement is legitimate, encouraged, and increasingly mandated under the Procurement Act 2023 — but it must be conducted fairly and transparently. Adhering to regulation and the formal procurement process is essential to ensure fair and transparent public procurement.
Treat all suppliers equally and respect buyer communication protocols. If a buyer specifies no contact before a questionnaire deadline, honour that. Don’t attempt to circumvent formal tender processes or lobby for early access to information. Declare conflicts of interest where existing relationships with buyer staff exist. Respond within stated deadlines and don’t pressure buyers for special treatment. Keep a full audit trail of all interactions — emails, meeting notes, questionnaire responses — to protect yourself and demonstrate compliance.
The public sector plays a central role in public procurement, and transparency and compliance with regulations are crucial for maintaining trust and fairness in all procurement activities. The Act’s transparency requirements protect all suppliers. Use them to your advantage, but don’t exploit them. Winning through early market engagement means winning on merit — because you understood the buyer’s requirements better than anyone else, not because you received preferential treatment.
Early Market Engagement is Essential
Early market engagement is no longer optional — it’s the competitive standard. Suppliers who respond to preliminary market engagement notices, PINs, and planned procurement notices gain six to twelve months of advance intelligence, shape buyer requirements, and win at significantly higher rates.
The data is clear. Suppliers using early engagement tools report 40–60% shortlist rates versus 10–20% for non-engaged suppliers — a two to six times advantage. Win rates uplift by 20–30% when suppliers engage pre-tender. Real-time alerts compress response windows from days to hours, and systematic engagement transforms your pipeline from reactive to proactive.
The procurement market is moving toward earlier, more transparent engagement. Suppliers who master early market engagement will have a structural competitive advantage — not just in individual bids, but in overall market positioning and pipeline health.
DCI Contracts delivers real-time alerts on preliminary market engagement notices, PINs, and planned procurement notices, enriched with buyer intelligence and CPV codes. Your team responds faster, shapes buyer requirements, and wins more.
Ready to capture early market engagement opportunities? Request a demo of DCI to see how real-time alerts can accelerate your early engagement strategy and improve your win rates.
