Why your profile is the most important thing you set up
TenderSignal matches new tenders against your profile as they are ingested. Get your profile right and your alerts will feel curated; leave it at its defaults and you will either miss relevant opportunities or be buried in irrelevant ones. Spending ten minutes now will save hours of manual searching every week.
This guide walks you through each section in order and ends with a troubleshooting section if your alerts are not quite right after the first week.
Step 1: Choose your sectors
TenderSignal uses 17 plain-English sectors rather than raw CPV codes, so you do not need to know procurement jargon to get started. The sectors cover the most common areas where UK public and private sector buyers spend money:
- Construction and civil engineering
- IT and software
- Data and digital
- Healthcare and medical
- Social care
- Facilities and property management
- Professional services and consulting
- Engineering and manufacturing
- Environmental and utilities
- Energy
- Transport and logistics
- Security services
- Education and training
- Marketing and communications
- Legal and financial services
- Goods and supplies
- Cultural and recreation
You are not limited to one sector. If your business spans more than one area, select all sectors that genuinely apply. The only rule is to be honest rather than aspirational: only choose sectors where you could realistically submit a bid. Choosing too many sectors leads to irrelevant matches, so if you find yourself getting alerts for work you would never pursue, return here and remove what does not fit.
Step 2: Set your regions or nations
Most tenders are location-specific, so your region settings have a large effect on the volume and relevance of your matches. TenderSignal lets you filter by nation or by individual English region:
- Nations: UK-wide, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Ireland (Republic of Ireland), plus an EU option
- English regions: North East, North West, Yorkshire, East Midlands, West Midlands, East of England, London, South East, South West
If you can deliver work anywhere in the UK, select all nations and regions. If you prefer to stay within a few hours of your base, select only the regions where you are genuinely willing to mobilise a team or attend site visits. Many buyers allow fully remote delivery for services contracts (IT, consultancy, marketing), so it is worth widening your region for those types of work even if you keep a tighter geography for construction or facilities jobs.
Step 3: Choose your alert frequency
Once your profile is set, TenderSignal will send you digest alerts by email. You can choose between:
- Weekly: a single digest each week summarising new matches. This is the default and works well if you are new to tendering or have limited bandwidth for reviewing opportunities.
- Daily (Pro and Business): a morning alert every weekday with tenders published in the last 24 hours. This is the right choice once you have a confident profile and want to respond quickly to new notices.
You can change your frequency at any time from your account settings. If you upgrade your plan, your frequency switches to daily automatically, and you can change it back at any time.
Step 4: Save keyword searches for extra precision
Your profile controls the broad filter; saved searches add precision on top of it. A saved search is a keyword query you write, such as flood risk assessment, CCTV maintenance or Microsoft 365 licencing. TenderSignal runs it against every new tender and alerts you on a match, independently of your profile sectors.
Saved searches are particularly useful when you have a niche specialisation that sits across multiple sectors, when you want to track a specific buyer or framework by name, or when you want to monitor a technology or methodology. Go to the Saved Searches section of your dashboard to create and label them.
Troubleshooting: adjusting your alerts after the first week
Getting too many matches?
If your inbox is filling up with tenders you would never bid for, work through these steps in order:
- Narrow your regions. If you selected UK-wide but only operate in one part of England, remove the nations and regions you cannot serve.
- Remove sectors that are adjacent to your work but not actually relevant. Be strict: if you would not bid, remove it.
- Use a saved keyword search with specific terms instead of a broad sector, and remove the sector filter entirely for that area of work.
Getting too few matches?
If your alerts are sparse, try the following:
- Add one or two adjacent sectors. For example, an IT consultancy might add Data and digital or Professional services and consulting alongside its primary sector.
- Widen your geographic coverage. Many buyers will consider suppliers from outside their immediate region, especially for services delivered remotely.
- Check the time of year. August and UK bank holiday periods genuinely produce fewer new tender notices as procurement teams take leave. A quiet week is not a sign that something is broken.
- Make sure your saved searches are not too narrow. Single highly specific phrases will match very few notices.
Refining your profile after the first week
Your first profile is a hypothesis, not a finished configuration. After your first week of alerts, take ten minutes to ask yourself: which matches were genuinely interesting, which were irrelevant, and were there any types of work you expected to see but did not? Use those answers to adjust your sectors, regions and keyword searches. Most users settle on a well-tuned profile after two or three iterations. Check your saved search match history in the dashboard and retire any keyword searches that are not pulling in relevant work.
Ready to set up or review your profile?
Head to your profile settings to get started. If you already have a profile and want to tighten it up, your dashboard shows your current settings alongside your latest matches so you can evaluate both at once.