A spreadsheet of sixty addresses
A retail chain sends a tender. They want connectivity and hosted voice at sixty shops, two warehouses and a head office. The site list is a spreadsheet exported from their property system: some rows have full addresses, some only a shop name and postcode, a few have the wrong postcode entirely. The deadline is a fortnight away.
Your pre-sales person starts checking. For each site they enter the address in one supplier's availability checker, pick the right premises from a dropdown, note the fibre and copper options and speeds, then do it again in a second supplier's tool, and a third for leased line pricing at the bigger sites. Each result gets typed into a master spreadsheet. By day three they have done half the list and the rest of their work has stopped.
The same thing happens, more quietly, every time an existing multi-site customer asks for an upgrade review.
And when the customer asks, a week after submission, whether you could price an alternative at twelve of the sites, the whole process starts again for those twelve.
Why checking in bulk is so slow
- Supplier checkers are built for one address at a time, through a web page.
- Addresses must match the supplier's own address database, often down to a unique premises reference, and customer lists do not provide that.
- Each supplier returns results in its own words and product names.
- Leased line prices depend on the exact location and are quoted separately.
- Results change over time, so a check done for last year's review is out of date.
What slow checks cost
| Delay or error | Result |
|---|---|
| Pre-sales tied up for days | Other quotes wait |
| Wrong premises selected | Quote based on the wrong availability |
| Only one supplier checked | Better option at a site missed |
| Results typed by hand | Mistakes that surface at order time |
| Tender deadline pressure | Bid goes in with gaps or guesses |
Tenders are where larger accounts come from. If your team cannot respond to a big site list quickly and accurately, you are only competing for the small ones.
There is a quieter risk as well. A tender response built on a hurried check can win the business and then fail at order time, when a site turns out to have only copper, or the fibre product quoted is not available at that particular premises. Explaining that to a new customer in the first month is not how you want the relationship to start.
The bulk availability checker we build
- The customer's site list is uploaded as it comes. Addresses are cleaned and matched to a standard address reference, and ambiguous ones are shown with the candidate matches for a person to pick.
- For each site, the checker queries each supplier that offers availability checking by API to its partners. For suppliers without an API, it produces the list in the format their bulk tool or account team accepts.
- Results are translated into your own product names and speeds, so sites can be compared across suppliers.
- Your price list and margin rules are applied, giving a per-site recommended option and alternatives.
- Leased line sites are marked for a separate pricing request, with the details already filled in.
- The output is a single comparison, per site and summarised, ready to go into your tender response or quoting tool, with the date each check was made.
Checks are stored against the customer, so an upgrade review later only re-checks what has changed.
How tenders feel afterwards
The site list goes in, and the first pass comes back without anyone copying and pasting. Pre-sales spend their time on the judgement calls: which ambiguous address is right, which option to recommend at a site with poor availability, how to price the estate as a whole. The response goes in with every site checked against every supplier you use.
Existing multi-site customers benefit too. A regular re-check of their estate shows when better connectivity becomes available at a site, which is a good reason to call them.
Recognise this?
- Multi-site tenders take days of availability checking.
- Addresses from customers need fixing before they can be checked.
- You usually check only one supplier per site because of time.
- Results are typed into a spreadsheet by hand.
- Existing multi-site customers are rarely re-checked for upgrades.