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Keeping Track

Posted in: Blog, What's New on April 18, 2010 | No Comments

Selling your product or services to the government can be one of the best ways to transform your business from average to successful. The government is the largest buyer of products and services in the world with the added benefit of being mandated to pay you on time.

Of course, it’s not easy. There is a lot to keep track of. And while success ultimately depends on a great many things, there are two things that are absolutely essential – one: do everything on time, and two: do everything on time.

If you’re like us, there are simply too many individual tasks to do to keep it in your head. You need to write it all down some place. You need to keep track. While we know that there are as many ways to “keep track” as there are things to keep track of – all of them are essentially just a list of tasks.

We’ve just released an update to Bidspeed that promotes “keeping track” to a first class idea. Here’s the important changes:

There are now 3 types of tasks –
1. Opportunity tasks: related to items on your watchlist
2. Contact tasks: related to contacts in your contact list.
3. Stand-alone tasks: general purpose tasks
The top-level tab “Tasks” shows you a list of all of them, grouped by the type of task. If you’ve related the task to a contact or an opportunity, you can click on the link and see a link directly related to the item the task applies to.
You can now create tasks from 3 places:
1. The main “Dashboard” (Click ‘Create a New Task’)
2. An item on your watchlist (Click ‘New’ on the list of tasks)
3. A contact in your contact list (Click ‘New’ on the list of tasks)

We’ve spent most of our time trying to keep it simple because we know that no matter how clever a list of tasks gets, if it isn’t used then it isn’t helpful.

The other major change is that you can see your tasks on a calendar and even move them around on the calendar. This makes for a very easy way to rearrange your day / week / month.

If you’d like to give it a try then you should try Bidspeed and start creating your tasks. It won’t cost you anything for the first 30 days and after that it’s less than $0.63 a day.

Hey, there is a lot to keep track of. Get out there and start keeping track.

Simple Workflow

Posted in: Blog, What's New on February 22, 2010 | No Comments

The first essential step to winning government opportunities is simple: do everything on time. We’ve recently added some features in Bidspeed that help you with this. There are 4 important milestones to track:

Internal Response Date. Originally, this date is set to the same date as the response date on the solicitation. By default, you’ll get email about the due date starting 3 days before and continuing until you change the status (to “Responded” or “Won’t respond”).
Questions Due. This is the date for the last day of questions. This isn’t part of the data we get from FedBizOpps, so you’ll need to enter it yourself. Bidspeed sends a reminder email 3 days before.
Pre-proposal Conference Date. This is the date for the pre-proposal conference (or conference call), if there is one. Again, you enter this date yourself. Bidspeed sends you a reminder 3 days before.
Site Visit. This is the date for the site visit, if any. Bidspeed sends you a reminder 3 days before it’s due.

We’ve tried to keep both the number of steps and the number of email reminders flying around to an absolute minimum. (Bidspeed only reminds you once of the Questions Due, Pre-proposal Conference, and Site Visit.)

This is a frequent topic of discussion around here, and it’ll probably continue to evolve. We’ve tried to strike a balance between annoying and useful with the understanding that annoying is, well, annoying. The general opinion being that something is never both useful AND annoying.

In order to set any of these dates you simply need to edit the opportunity (click on the caption at the top of the opportunity detail page).

Along with this, there have been a few other changes:

There is a new Win/Loss Status: Cancelled. Choose this status when you’ve gone to the serious trouble of responding to the opportunity just to have the agency decide they aren’t going forward.
There is a new Yes/No field named: Bid Bond Required.
There are 2 new status types: Review and Future. The “Review” status can be used when you are still deciding if you should respond. Opportunities in the Review status are still treated as active (same as “New” or “In Progress”) and you will still be reminded when the due date approaches. You can put opportunities in the “Future” status if you are planning to respond, but the solicitation is either early stage (see http://www.fedbidspeed.com/cracking-the-code) or considerably far away.

Finally, we have added a feature that will allow you to change the overall display width of pages in Bidspeed. To do this, click on My Account, Preferences, and check “Full Width” box on the Preferences page. When you save, the page will now expand to fill the entire width of your screen. This has been a much requested feature and one that those of you that have larger monitors will likely want to use.

Location, Location, Location

Posted in: Blog, Using Bidspeed, What's New on February 9, 2010 | 1 Comment

One of the more requested features was for us to add “State” to the list of searchable fields in the opportunity list. The latest update adds this ability, and more to the main search pages. To add the field to your list, click on “Customize” then “Additional Fields” and choose “State” from the list.

You can now use the standard Bidspeed search to find items in your state:

If you want to include items ONLY in your state type the state code in the list and press enter. If you want to include multiple states, separate them with the word ‘OR’ (CA OR AZ OR CO). If you want to include items that do NOT have a state, you can add the phrase “IS NULL” (without the quotes).

You’ll notice that if you hover over the state column (even when there isn’t a state identified for the opportunity) you’ll see more information about the location – Zip, contracting office address, state, latitude, and longitude.

You’ll also notice that some solicitations don’t have a state (about 500 of the active solicitations as of February 8th). Most of the time the reason for this is because the opportunity is to be performed at multiple locations – for example: “Various locations in Korea, Mainland Japan, Okinawa or Guam Torii Station, Okinawa, Japan.” We don’t have a good way to put a state or a geo location for these types of opportunities.

Another reason is that the listed place of performance has a military zip code (APO, FPO) or it takes place in a country where the only data provided is a name (Columbia or Iraq) and we can’t determine the state (or geo location) with any accuracy.

For most users this isn’t much of a problem, for example if the opportunity takes place in Baghdad the fact that it’s 7,667 miles your office isn’t generally all that important.

New features like this are in response to requests by our users. So, if you have an idea for something that could be better in Bidspeed, send us an email: support@fedbidspeed.com.

Search Within A List

Posted in: Blog, What's New on January 27, 2010 | No Comments

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:

What’s New – January

Posted in: Blog, What's New on January 11, 2010 | No Comments

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:

Proximity Filtering

Posted in: Blog, Product, What's New on December 18, 2009 | No Comments

Our most frequent support call by far has to do with finding local opportunities. So, because we’ve had a bunch of requests, we’ve just released an update to the site that adds proximity filtering for opportunities.

To use it – just type a number in the “Distance from <zip code>” and click the Apply Filter button ( Apply ) or press Enter. The zip code is the zip code for your account. If you haven’t entered it you can by clicking on “Manage your account” on the Welcome page. (If you don’t see the field in the list, click Customize, Additional Fields, then “Distance From <my zip code> “, then OK.)

The data posted by Federal agencies to FedBizOpps generally has a “Place of Performance” associated with it. In some cases, this data isn’t available, so Bidspeed uses the contracting office address. We mention this because we would suggest that you still browse new opportunities on a regular basis by your main classification code or by using the global search.

The global search (top right corner of the page) searches through the description of every solicitation and returns a list ranked by relevancy.

In case you’re wondering, the data for latitude and longitude comes from geonames.org

To toggle the filter so that you see only Active opportunities (Not Archived), simply click on the Filters button (at the top of the page), and check ‘Active.’ (Active opportunities have not been archived.) If you want to view only Current opportunities (Response Date is in the future), click ‘Current’ on the filters menu.

As always, we’re doing everything we can to provide our users with an application that helps them find, manage, and win government deals. Let us know what you think – we’re always grateful to hear from our customers.

FedBizOpps Filtering Made Easier

Posted in: Blog, Using Bidspeed, What's New on November 10, 2009 | No Comments

We’ve just released an update to the site that makes filtering the list of FedBizOpps opportunities even simpler. First, you’ll notice a handy welcome page when you first log in. Right in the center of the page is a link that says “Search for FedBizOpps Opportunities.”

Next, the list of opportunities has 3 links:

All Opportunities – this is the default view of the list. You can narrow the list to appropriate items using the normal, filter-by-form capabilities described here: http://bit.ly/4x6DLU.
My Account Opportunities – this list shows opportunities filtered by your company’s main classification code. If you haven’t set your classification code there is a link at the top of the page.
Recently Added – this list shows opportunities created in the last 10 days. Again, you can add filter’s by using the normal filter-by-form capabilities.

What’s New – October

Posted in: Blog, Using Bidspeed, What's New on November 3, 2009 | No Comments

We’ve added several helpful features into the application in October. Here’s some highlights:

Interested Vendors List – When you add an opportunity to your watchlist Bidspeed will read the interested vendors from FedBizOpps and put them in a list on the main opportunity (Watchlist Item) page.
Calendar View – Items on your watchlist can now be viewed on a calendar. To get here, click on ‘Calendar’ on the Home page or ‘Calendar’ on the ‘Watchlist’ menu. The opportunities shown are Open Opportunities. You can click on an individual item and it will take you to the details.
Attach Contacts – From the detail page of a watchlist item you can now click the ‘add contacts’ button. This adds contacts to your personal list of contacts and attaches them to the current opportunity. If you click directly on the contact you can send them email directly from within Bidspeed. The advantage to this is that Bidspeed will keep track of your last contact and even saves the email that you sent them.
Create your own opportunities – so the deal you’re working on ISN’T in FedBizOpps? No problem. From the Home page click ‘Create a new Opportunity’ and fill out the information.

It’s a new product, and we’re dedicated to making it work the way you want it to, really, so you’ll have to keep those comments / requests coming.

What’s New – August

Posted in: Blog, What's New on August 20, 2009 | No Comments

We’re frantically trying to get new features into each release – here’s a few notable ones:

Email integration – you can send email now from the contact list or contact detail. Email that you send is logged to a note on a contact.
Search – we’re always trying to improve this, but we’ve made it a bit more friendly to those crazy solicitation numbers (things like W912PB-09-T-0341).
Outlook integration – from a contact click on the Outlook button and we’ll generate a vCard – very handy.
Create your own opportunities – so the deal you’re working on ISN’T in FedBizOpps? No problem. From the Home page click ‘Create a new Opportunity’ and fill out the information.