Before pursuing a public buyer, a capture team needs a defensible answer to three questions: what does this buyer purchase, what evidence might matter in the next competition, and what would make our offer credible?
The output of buyer intelligence is a short pursuit brief with sources and unanswered questions. A list of previous winners is only one input.
Start with the buyer's identity and scope
Record the buyer's legal name, identifiers, purchasing bodies and relevant aliases. A purchasing consortium and its member university are not automatically the same entity. Keep uncertain matches separate until an official record establishes the relationship.
Define the categories, geography and time range relevant to your offer. Include lot-level records. A large procedure can mix services you deliver with work you could never supply.
Build an evidence table
| Evidence | Question it helps answer | Limitation to retain |
|---|---|---|
| Award notice and winning supplier | Who has supplied comparable work? | Award publication may be incomplete |
| Specification and evaluation method | What did the buyer ask for and reward? | A future competition can differ |
| Contract duration and options | When should we investigate next? | Extensions and start dates may be unknown |
| Lots and framework structure | Is there a route suitable for our scale? | Admission does not guarantee orders |
| Amendment or cancellation | Did the procurement change? | Publication alone may not explain why |
The Open Contracting Data Standard distinguishes awards, contracts and implementation. Preserve that distinction when assembling the brief: an award value is not evidence of payments made.
Analyse competition without inventing win rates
A supplier with six observed awards has six observed awards. Unless you know how many comparable bids it submitted and their outcomes, you cannot calculate its win rate. If the notice gives a tender count, keep it attached to that competition; it does not identify every unsuccessful bidder.
Supplier concentration can show dependence in the observed sample, but not prove favoritism or corruption. Separate a pattern from its possible explanations: specialist capability, framework admission, small sample size, missing data or buyer preference all require further investigation.
Compare prices only when the units match
Check scope, quantities, duration, currency, tax, options, price indexation and whether the figure is a ceiling or committed amount. A multi-year managed service and an equipment supply cannot be benchmarked by headline award value alone.
Report ranges for a defined comparable cohort and disclose excluded records. If quantities or service boundaries are missing, explain why a unit-price comparison is unavailable.
Worked buyer brief
Illustrative buyer: a regional university purchasing network support.
- Observed: three published awards in the chosen period, two supplier names, and one framework arrangement.
- Unknown: complete award population, call-off volumes, contract start date and extension exercise.
- Implication: investigate framework access and delivery requirements before treating the buyer as an immediate open competition.
- Next action: locate the current official procedure, check the latest specification and confirm whether your references meet its requirements.
This supports a pursuit decision without claiming an incumbent is unbeatable or that the next purchase is imminent.
Turn the brief into action
Write one paragraph on why your team could satisfy the current evaluation criteria, with evidence for each assertion. Add the unresolved questions, owners and source links. Feed the result into the bid/no-bid framework.
For longer-range planning, use awards-to-renewal analysis. For a leadership report, use procurement metrics with explicit denominators. To evaluate Duke for buyer research, bring this brief and a known public award to a product discussion.
Reviewed 13 September 2026. The buyer example and analysis method are illustrative; no customer results or market-wide supplier ranking is asserted.