# Tendify: What Your Buyers Actually Say

**Buyer research prepared by Maxionlabs for Tendify. 1 September 2026.**

Every objection, request and constraint we can evidence, from recorded demo calls and the full
inbound reply history, quoted in their own words and attributed.

## Evidence base

| | |
|---|---|
| Meetings held | 14 |
| Full transcripts | 8 |
| Replies reviewed | 1,725 |
| Genuine human replies | 157 |
| Attributed quotes | 98 |
| Period | 16 June to 1 September 2026 |

**Method.** Eight recorded demo calls transcribed in full, plus every inbound reply in the outreach
inbox for the period, filtered to genuine human replies and classified. Quotes are copied
character-for-character from transcripts and reply bodies and verified against source. Counts are by
distinct company, never by mention.

---

# 1. Objections, ranked by how many different buyers raised them

## 1.1 "We already find our own tenders" — 13+ buyers

The dominant objection by a distance. Almost every company already runs a keyword monitor, a national
portal alert, or something in-house.

> "I have a similar service running and it finds similar tenders as you do. I will pass for now."
> — Sebastian Grigander, Kreditz (SE)

> "We are working on it, and we do have it set up, and for four years we are using it, so the keywords
> and all the stuff like this, just auto search, and then you get the complete list every day of the
> tenders... So we don't really need to change it."
> — Wojciech Strzałkowski, Seedia (PL), on the call, 26 Aug

> "I highly doubt that. Very few relevant public tenders aren't sent to us directly from the customer
> in a year." — Mattias Lindblom, Head of Account Management, Mediaflow (SE)

> "We already have inhouse what you offer. We have our AI automations from scrapping tenders to
> evaluation and writing offers." — Burcovschi David

**What works against it:** not arguing about finding. Conceding the home market and selling the
markets they cannot read. Language is the mechanism, not coverage. This converted Xdav to a trial.

**The corollary:** six buyers said unprompted that domestic matches are worthless to them. Two of them,
Artifik and Xdav, only engaged once the matches went cross-border.

## 1.2 "Those aren't our tenders" — 6+ buyers

Buyers judge match precision in one glance, and they do not give a second one.

> "Those tenders are actually very far from what we do and work on usually and our expertise is in
> totally different areas." — Dr inż. Nikodem Czechowski, CTO, BulletProve (PL)

> "None of those are close to what we work on, i.e. sustainability action plans and GHG emissions
> modeling / forecasting." — Joonas Pekkanen, Kausal (FI)

> "The things I've got here is a general supply of liquid nitrogen, that's not us... Drying cabinets,
> that's not what we do either."
> — Fredrik Wernstedt, CEO, Direkttest (SE), reading his own match list live on the call

**The mechanism behind it:** a company's procurement category describes what the *buyer* purchased,
not what the *supplier* sells. The award title says what they sell. Seeding a monitor from the
category sends it to the wrong market with total confidence.

## 1.3 "It's too expensive" — 2 for, 1 against

> "Honestly, 149 is very expensive for considering what we look at... right now we pay, I think it's
> 400 or 390 per year on the platform... being really honest with you, I don't see a match due to
> pricing mainly." — Rodrigo Nunes de Souza, Innoarea (ES)

Nevontis named a local provider at roughly a third of the price. But one buyer did the arithmetic
himself, unprompted, and reached the opposite conclusion:

> "If there were six or seven extra tenders a month that we didn't see that are possible, that's six
> or seven leads. And that would be more than you'd pay, more than 150 euros for that."
> — Niall Fennell, Ronspot (IE)

**This is an anchor problem, not a value problem.** Buyers who count *tenders found* compare EUR149
against a EUR30-50 national keyword tool and it looks expensive. Buyers who count *leads gained*
reach for the calculator and find it cheap. The pricing conversation is a framing conversation.

## 1.4 "I don't trust AI to make the call" — 2 buyers, one emphatic

> "If you participate and if there goes something wrong, the company might just disastrously disappear
> in the process. And by that we don't really consider ourselves capable of trusting the AI process
> right now." — Wojciech Strzałkowski, Seedia (PL)

> "Someone has to read it and he's making the decision, not the AI... I did it a couple of times, it's
> working like 50-50, not going to lie." — same call

> "This value is nothing for me because of the thing that it may suggest... I need to double and triple
> check it at the end, and sometimes, unfortunately, it is wrong." — same call

**To a person personally liable for the bid, an AI that suggests adds verification work rather than
removing it.** This buyer had already tested AI and measured it as a coin flip. Answering him needs a
measured accuracy figure, not an adjective.

## 1.5 "Reviewing tenders is my job" — 4 companies

> "I don't need to pay someone to review tenders and tell me what to bid for. I am best placed to do
> this. I also am very busy and not currently looking for new work."
> — Kate Wilkinson, Managing Consultant, about|face Consulting (IE)

> "Your proposal is to participate in a chain of information transformation into added value. But this
> is the work of sales department. I would prefer to avoid this." — Antanas Mitašiūnas

Consultancies and one-person advisory shops produce the most hostile replies in the corpus. Their
expertise *is* what the product displaces. This is a targeting question, not a messaging one.

## 1.6 "There are no tenders in our category" — 3+ buyers

> "Our normal problem is that there are no tenders... usually it's built on trust and connections, and
> then we sort of work with the researchers for years and years... that one tender that you found was
> only because they sort of knew what supplier they wanted, and it was then listed because the size of
> the project was so large that they had to put out the tender."
> — Fredrik Wernstedt, CEO, Direkttest (SE)

> "We work in very much a competitive niche. Tenders only come once in a while that are suitable. But
> I am always happy to be convinced otherwise." — Ingo Aicher, Jones AV (UK)

A single public award can be a formality wrapped around a supplier already chosen. More than one win,
spread across more than one buyer, is the signal that a company genuinely competes.

## 1.7 Data residency disqualifies them abroad — 1 buyer, 3 countries

> "I've met with public entities in Canada and they told me, Philippe, your tool looks amazing, but if
> you don't have data hosted in Canada, we cannot work together. I've met a similar company in
> Denmark. I had the same with Luxembourg." — Philippe Corbisier, Leexi (BE)

He gated his own upgrade to full European coverage on evidence: show me the share of bids where
in-country hosting is not required. That evidence would unlock a tier upgrade, and it probably
generalises to every SaaS company in the book.

## 1.8 Capacity, not interest — 9 replies

> "We are already filling documentation for ZZZS tenders with partners." — Vladimir Rančić, Xdav (SI)

> "This is interesting but I am a one man show and only do this part time, so some tenders are not
> ideal as they require more time than I can dedicate." — 9 Lives H&S

Not rejections. The bottleneck is bid-writing hours, not tender discovery. Whatever cuts the cost of
*responding* reaches these buyers. More listings do not.

## 1.9 The two-sided conflict — 1 buyer, strategic

> "It's important to be clear on what side you're on, because you should be suspected to do dirty
> business, right? You're providing bidders with more information than other bidders."
> — Håvard Tamburplass, Artifik (NO), who sells to the contracting-authority side

Raised politely and not dropped when waved away. Worth a settled answer before the question arrives
from someone less friendly.

---

# 2. What they ask for

## 2.1 The tenders, before the call

Eight of twenty positive replies in the August window and roughly fourteen of twenty-four in July.
It is still arriving weekly.

> "Share the 3 headlines please and we can arrange a chat if theyre relevant."
> — Christopher Brown, KPMG Ireland

> "Share please, let's see if you found something which I haven't." — Benedikt Breiling, EnterpriseDB

> "Please give me an example so I can check if the tender fits us." — Jāzeps Linde, Tapbox (LV)

> "Can you send the results without the meeting, so we can see what you have to offer first?"
> — Simon Felix, Ateleris (CH)

> "Sure, if you send me one that you think is relevant for us, I'll have the call and likely subscribe
> if it is relevant." — Olav Akrawi, Arx Compliance (NO)

> "I'm interested, but before scheduling a meeting, could you please send me the details of the three
> tenders you mentioned, including their names (or reference numbers), deadlines, and why you [think
> they fit]." — Artur Osman, AtletSport

**The buyer's test never changes: did you find something I did not?** Everything else in the sale is
downstream of passing it.

## 2.2 Cross-border only. The home market is not the product.

> "If I could request that the 3 matched open tenders are not from Ireland, that would be great."
> — Niall Fennell, Ronspot (IE)

> "Relevant data for other European markets to support our expansion strategy."
> — Håvard Tamburplass, Artifik (NO)

> "We are interested in reviewing public tenders from nearby countries that are within a few hours'
> drive." — Vladimir Rančić, Xdav (SI), naming Austria, Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia

**Neighbours by driving distance, not by market size.** Xdav named a map of where a project manager
can get to and back.

## 2.3 Not to miss the rare one

> "For me, better is that I really don't miss something. I have always the fear that I miss one or the
> other tender." — Volker Zimmermann, Neocosmo (DE)

**He is buying insurance, not efficiency.** He said this in response to a pitch about saving time and
collaborating, and named the mismatch himself on the call. For a buyer in a category with few, large,
infrequent tenders, "never miss one" is worth far more than "save an hour".

## 2.4 The tender read for them, not just found

> "I'd want to read the tender to understand whether we could pursue it."
> — Stefan van Loon, Climetric (NL), who booked 29 minutes later

Finding is the cheap half. The expensive half is the afternoon spent discovering you do not qualify.

## 2.5 Proof about the market, before they commit

- **Philippe (Leexi)** asked for a custom cut of the research report as a condition of upgrading.
- **Pierre-Antoine (Leexi)** asked for the percentage of winners who are local to each country.
- **Vladimir (Xdav)** asked for client win rates, domestic versus international.
- **Olav (Arx Compliance)** asked to see a closed tender's full documentation.

Four buyers asked for evidence about the market rather than features. None has an answer waiting.

## 2.6 A video instead of a call. Integrations instead of a new pipeline.

> "Please record me a video of system work. No space at the moment to schedule a call in coming 3
> weeks." — Piotr Hołubowicz, CEO, Seedia (PL)

Niall wants HubSpot deal-stage sync. Volker declined the pipeline half outright because his team
already lives in Zoho. The monitoring half sells on its own; the workflow half competes with a CRM
they have already bought.

---

# 3. What lands

> "First of all, very nice cold email strategy. Well done."
> — Philippe Corbisier, Leexi (BE), opening the call

> "It does look quite powerful, because what it would take to try go and search through all those
> databases would be huge." — Niall Fennell, Ronspot (IE)

> "Which tender did we win?"
> — Christian Strøyberg, CEO, Industriprint (DK). Buyers often do not know their own award history.

- **A named, open tender landing fast.** Every thread where the first reply carried real named tenders
  booked the same day.
- **Their own award, named back to them.** It proves the data is real before any claim is made.
- **An honest nil.** One buyer told there was nothing for him volunteered the richest market
  intelligence in the entire corpus in the same reply.
- **The scale of the search, once they picture doing it by hand.**
- **Language coverage.** Raised unprompted by the Slovenian buyer as his single blocker.
- **The award-notice idea** for companies that supply the winner rather than bid themselves.

---

# 4. What repels them

> "Everybody hates Tender platforms." — Niall Fennell, Ronspot (IE)

Said cheerfully, by a buyer who then took a trial. The category starts underwater.

- **A question where they expected the goods.** One buyer who asked to see matches and got a
  qualifying question instead killed the thread in under three hours.
- **Closed or expired notices.** One buyer checked all three he was sent and found every one had
  already closed. He is now the most decorated sceptic in the book.
- **A description without a notice number.** Buyers cannot verify prose. They can verify a publication
  number and a deadline.
- **Domestic matches.** Six buyers, unprompted, across three countries.
- **A promise that ends at a signup wall.** Interest evaporates at the exact moment it peaks.
- **AI framed as making the decision** rather than preparing it.

---

# 5. How these companies actually operate

## 5.1 Nobody owns tender search

> "No one is responsible. Right now, from time to time, we have Philippe and some of the others from
> the enterprise team that check if there's some open things. We don't check regularly and since we
> don't have every website of each country for the tenders, we usually don't check them."
> — Pierre-Antoine Thomas-Caulier, AE, Leexi (BE)

Where nobody owns it, there is no incumbent to displace and no switching cost. Where somebody *does*
own it, they are personally liable, have four years of muscle memory, and are the hardest sale in the
book. **Two completely different sales, and the qualifying question is simply "who checks?"**

## 5.2 They already have something, and often built it themselves

> "Yes, we use Claude AI. We have created our own agent for writing Tenders... It saves so much time
> because it contains our content." — Volker Zimmermann, Neocosmo (DE)

Incumbents named across the corpus: national keyword monitors, a paid German crawler, a Spanish
regional platform, a Lithuanian feed, in-house AI agents, plus inbound and framework channels that
bypass tendering entirely.

## 5.3 Channels no feed can see

> "In Latvia we also have a local procurement system where we're listed as an official partner for
> self-service solutions, so government companies can procure our solution directly through it, and
> that won't show up on any third-party platforms." — Jāzeps Linde, Tapbox (LV)

Leexi is referenced through UGAP and other French central purchasing bodies and describes itself as
"relying mostly on inbound so far, which is a very luxurious place to sit."

## 5.4 Two motions, not one

> "When the general contractor is on, we can pursue the sales by contacting them, offering their
> products and they have to pay us first, like prepayment for us."
> — Wojciech Strzałkowski, Seedia (PL)

**The strongest product idea in the research, and it surfaced live on that call:** for a company that
supplies the winner rather than bidding as prime, an *award* notice tells them who just won a contract
they can sell into. Award data stops being research and becomes a lead source.

## 5.5 The real constraint is often capital, not discovery

> "When you do the tender, you have to have your own budget to start the production... because in most
> of the cases, you are paid after you complete the tender." — Wojciech Strzałkowski, Seedia (PL)

## 5.6 Cross-border is blocked by presence, not by discovery

> "The healthcare industry in each country is extremely locked down locally, and without a local
> presence it's almost impossible to break into." — Jāzeps Linde, Tapbox (LV)

> "If you're entering a market, you're entering it to be there, right? You have to have a long-term
> perspective and you have to put in a lot of resources to win that market."
> — Håvard Tamburplass, Artifik (NO)

## 5.7 Team size does not track award value

One company holds a EUR669,713 award with two people and bids three or four times a year in one
country. Another describes itself as "a small company" while employing German, Italian, Spanish and
French speakers, so language was explicitly not its blocker. Coverage was.

## 5.8 How they buy

| Buyer | Stated path |
|---|---|
| Philippe, Leexi (BE) | Free trial, then monthly "so we don't take too much risk", then annual after three to five months for the discount |
| Niall, Ronspot (IE) | 14-day trial, asked for it twice, self-serve evaluation |
| Vladimir, Xdav (SI) | Free monitors first, decide on results, timing on his calendar |
| Piotr, Seedia (PL) | "If that catches Polish tenders well then we could switch from current solution" |

**Every one of them names the same gate: show me the matches over one to two weeks, then I decide.**
Nobody buys on the demo. They buy on the feed.

## 5.9 The best replies arrive by internal forward

Four of the strongest conversations in the period started when the original recipient passed the email
to somebody else. One arrived through a generic group alias and reached a VP of Sales. **The person
who opens the email is frequently not the person who answers it.**

---

# 6. Price and value, in buyers' own numbers

| Buyer | Their reference point |
|---|---|
| Innoarea (ES) | Incumbent platform at EUR390-400 per year |
| Nevontis (AT) | Local provider at "one third of the price" |
| Ronspot (IE) | Six or seven missed tenders a month is "more than you'd pay, more than 150 euros" |
| Seedia (PL) | Target contract size EUR1M-1.5M |
| MobilityLabel (NL) | Four public wins between EUR375k and EUR675k |

**The same price reads two ways, and the gap between them is the commercial argument.** Against a
EUR33/month keyword alert, EUR149 is 4.5x. Against one extra qualified
opportunity per quarter on a EUR400k contract, it rounds to zero. Nobody who framed it the second way
objected to the price.

---

# 7. Open questions the research cannot answer

A real buyer asked each of these and none has been answered. Every one is worth more than a feature.

1. **What is the client win rate, domestic versus international?** Asked directly by Xdav, and Leexi
   gated an upgrade on something similar. A single honest number would answer the most common
   objection in section 1.
2. **What share of European public bids do not require in-country data hosting?** Philippe at Leexi
   named this as his condition for buying full European coverage.
3. **What percentage of winners in each country are local?** Asked by Pierre-Antoine at Leexi. This is
   the cross-border argument, quantified.
4. **How accurate is the document analysis, measured?** The AI-trust objection cannot be answered with
   adjectives. The buyer who raised it had already measured his own attempts at 50-50.
5. **Which customers can be named in writing, and in which industries?** A reference from a buyer's own
   sector is the fastest way past the incumbent objection.

---

*Prepared by Maxionlabs for Tendify, 1 September 2026.*