At times, project owners may want to invite vendors to a project, regardless of the project's visibility. Inviting vendors to a project can help expand vendor outreach, especially by using Commodity Codes and the Recommendation Engine features. As well, it can increase the potential number of submissions on the project. Finally, project owners can send customized invites to specific vendors and vendors are able to then easily view the projects they have been invited to under their My Opportunities tab.
NOTE: For more information specific to inviting vendors to Invite Only projects, please see our article on Listing - Vendor Invites & Invite Only Projects
How do I invite vendors?
Under the Vendor Invites section, click on the Invite Vendors tab, then click the Invite Vendors button:
A popup window appears allowing you to invite vendors in a few different ways:
- Via the Recommended Engine - for more information on this feature, please see our article on How does Bonfire generate the vendor list used when inviting vendors with the Recommendation Engine feature?
- Via a Vendor List that has already been created
- By manually adding the email addresses
To add via the Recommendation Engine, ensure that you first have commodity codes added to your project. For more information on how to add commodity codes to your project, please see our article on Commodity Codes for Buyers.
Once codes are added, navigate to the Invite Vendors tab and the click "Add" button beneath 'Add via Recommendation Engine'. After doing so, a new window will open that will display the total number of vendors found, and a list of vendor email addresses. This list is generated by matching the commodity codes on the project, with the commodity codes vendors have added to their profiles as well as using the geographic location of your organization's region and the region(s) the vendors have chosen on their profile. If you come across with no results, trying adding more commodity codes and/or try adding codes that aren't as specific. On the contrary, if you are finding that you have too many vendors populating, you can reduce the number of commodity codes on the project and/or try adding more granular codes.
Another way to add vendors is through the 'Add via Vendor List'. This can only be achieved if at least one vendor list has been created within the Vendors module, and your role grants access to the list(s). To see the user roles that have access to create and edit lists, please see our article on Which User Roles can Create/Edit Vendor lists? As well, for more information on how to create and manage vendor lists, please see our article on Vendor Management and navigate to the section for Vendor Lists.
Once a list is created, head back to the Invite Vendors section of a project and simply use the Select a Vendor List dropdown and choose any custom vendor list.
In this example, we could select our "Pre-Qualified General Contractors" list to auto-populate the contact information for all those associated vendors:
Finally, project owners can easily add vendor email addresses into the text box provided under the Email option. It is much quicker to copy and paste email addresses, especially if you have a lot of them, however please ensure that the email addresses are separated by either a space or a comma, or they can be entered onto a new line.
After adding vendor emails in any of the above methods, project owners can add a custom message up to 2000 characters that will be included in the invite email sent to the vendors. You can send a custom message to a specific vendor or multiple vendors, and then come back again and create a new custom message for another vendor or multiple vendors! When you are ready to complete everything, click on the Invite button.
NOTE: Vendors will not be sent the invite until the project has opened.
Using the 'Allow Domain Match' feature
For more information on using the Allow Domain Match feature, please see our article on Listing - Vendor Invites & Invite Only Projects as this tool is meant to be used with Invite Only projects.
Vendor Email Invitation - What the Vendor sees
Once a project is in the open stage, the invites will be sent. Your vendor will receive an invitation similar to the image pictured below:
In order for a Vendor to gain full access and submit to projects, they must first confirm their account. Only after confirming their account will a Vendor then be able to prepare a submission for a project.
What does an Invited Vendor see after they have confirmed their account and logged in?
When the invited Vendor logs into their account, they will be able to see the projects to which they've been invited to under their My Opportunities tab:
Once you have invited Vendors to your Project, you can also create Reports on Vendor Invites! Read further here: How can I see who received an Invite to a Project?
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