Search Within A List

Posted in: Blog, What's New on January 27, 2010

At Bidspeed, a great deal of the support calls we get have are related to finding opportunities. There are many of users whose businesses sell (or plan to sell) very specific items to the government. With many of our users, a simple filter on “Class Code” is too broad.

To help with this, we’ve just released an update that makes searching in Bidspeed even simpler, and even more accurate. With this release, at the top the “Search FedBizOpps” pages you’ll see a new search box with the text: “Search within this list.”

When you add a search term into this text box (e.g. “socks” or “fire extinguishers”) and click the search button, Bidspeed will search the entire text of the opportunity using your phrase including any filter you have already defined. (Click here for advanced search rules).

Here’s an example:

Staying Optimistic

Posted in: Blog on January 26, 2010

The news in 2009 wasn’t good and you felt it. In a report released by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) the optimism index dropped 0.8 points, making November the sixth consecutive month the index has been below 90. It’s a good report, you can read it here: NFIB Small Business Economic Trends

What’s driving this crisis in confidence? Simple – buyers aren’t spending like they used to. Headcounts are down – 21% of small businesses reduced their workforce last year (4.2 workers on average). Capital expenditure plans are pessimistic as well – the percentage of businesses planning to make capital expenditures also fell to a 35-year low: 16%.

Hang in there – there is a bright spot. Government agencies are spending, especially the Federal Government.

Today is the day to start developing new customers and new leads. We’re not suggesting that it’s easy. Selling to new customers is never easy, and the Federal Government can certainly be a tough sell. But it’s still a new customer.

Worth it, if you ask us.

What’s New – January

Posted in: Blog, What's New on January 11, 2010

Tags

We’ve added simple tags support for opportunities on your watchlist and contacts. You can use tags to categorize items for easy filtering. To add a tag, just type the tags into the list and click save. You can add multiple words by separating the tags with a comma. It looks like this:

To search for a tagged item just type the tag name and press enter. You can match multiple tags by including the words “AND” and “OR.” For example, to find all items with the tag “dhs” and “business” type: “dhs AND business” (without the quotes) into the text box at the top of the page. To find items that have EITHER tag, use “dhs OR business.” (again, without the quotes).

Rich Text

You can now edit your notes on a deal and the description of any new opportunities using a simple rich text editor. To edit an opportunity that you’ve created, just click on the caption:

Workflow

Bidspeed already had simple workflow related to due dates. Now, we’ve added an additional item to help you keep track of the date that questions on a particular solicitation is due. In order to set this date you simply need to edit the opportunity (click on the caption at the top of the opportunity detail page) and set a date. Bidspeed automatically reminds you before the date passes to make sure that you’ve asked any questions you need to ask: