Construction Sales & Marketing Blog

The Builders Conference

To be really effective construction marketers need to stay on top of everything that happens in their particular market sectors. One way that CBD does that for clients is by use of the 'The Builders Conference' web-based UK tender and contract-award database. It’s one of three major market intelligence databases in this field, but an especially powerful source given that it’s a builders-own research organisation.

'The Builders Conference' is a tender reporting and market information service which tracks larger (£100k+) construction tenders to the award stage. It is a non-profit organization that works to provide specific market information to member companies, whether main or specialist contractors. Non-contractors such as CBD can become Affiliate members. It basically works as an information hub, a place where members in construction can congregate to lean about potential projects and sales opportunities.

For example, in our last post, we looked at one particular contractor that was interested in staking out a sizable section of the regional care home market. To do this, that company needs to be very well informed about the present state of the Care Home construction market including key operators and current project activity.

'The Builders Conference' facilitates this need. For example, as a member, you can log on to the members webpage and perform a basic search for 'care home.' The search results will include every major tender, related to care homes, in the UK. For the last search that I performed, there were around 350 results, covering both past and current schemes. Because this is a large number to handle, you can then organize these results by a wide number of factors. This includes: project value, region, category, date entered and awarded date.

What this means practically, is that within a few minutes, you can have an accurate picture of different regional markets for any particular type of construction. As construction marketers, this is a crucial ability for us to have. We need to rapidly analyze both regional market trends and identify key players and their projects so that we can best instruct our clients. 'The Builders Conference' is one of the tools that enables us to do this.

Posted by John Raines on 19/10/08

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