Your supplier book: which suppliers actually bid, win, or never reply

Search for how to keep track of your suppliers and you'll mostly find supplier scorecards. They're the right tool for suppliers you already give regular work to. They rate on-time delivery, defects and how a supplier handles a problem, and they help you decide who keeps a contract.

But a scorecard measures what happens after you award the order. When you're sourcing a one-off part for a customer, most of the suppliers you ask never get the order, so a scorecard has nothing to say about them. The questions you need answered come earlier. Will this supplier reply at all? Do they bid on this kind of part? Do their prices ever win?

Most free supplier list templates don't help here either. They're contact lists: name, phone, payment terms. That's useful, but it doesn't tell you who answers.

The record that helps is a log of your requests. It's the one thing you learn from every request, and it's usually lost in your inbox a week later.

Add one row for each supplier on each request. Keep it to what you'll actually fill in on a busy day:

1. Request reference. Use the same reference as your RFQ email, so you can find the replies again. (If you don't have a standard request yet, how to get quotes from several suppliers has a template.)
2. Date sent.
3. Item or category. "Fasteners" or "brass fittings" is enough. You want to see patterns by category, not by part number.
4. Supplier.
5. Invited. Always yes. It's there so the summary can count it.
6. Replied. Yes if they answered at all, even with "we can't do this one".
7. Bid. Yes if they sent a price.
8. Won. Yes if they got the order, or part of it.
9. Notes. Anything you'd want to know next time: "quoted an equivalent", "3-day lead time", "price came in after the deadline".

The best time to fill it in is when you award. You have every reply in front of you, and it takes two minutes. Leave it until Friday and you'll only remember the winner.

Keep "replied" and "bid" as separate columns. A supplier who writes back "we don't stock brass" is useful. They're paying attention, and they've told you not to send them brass fittings. A supplier who never writes back has told you nothing, and you can't tell whether they saw your email at all.

The record pays off when you're about to send the next request. Here's what it looks like in practice.

A supplier you've asked five times about fasteners has never replied. Leave them off the next fastener request. Every request you send them is a reply you're waiting for that won't come, and it makes your three to five look like four when it's really three.

A supplier bids often but rarely wins. Look at your notes before you drop them. Maybe their lead time is always three days, so they lose on anything urgent but would be fine for an order that can wait. Or they're pricing for box quantities and you keep asking for 50 pieces. A short call to ask what order sizes suit them can turn a regular loser into a useful option.

Only one supplier ever bids on a category. One bid means you can't compare anything. You take their price because there's nothing to measure it against. Next time, add one or two new suppliers for that category alongside the one you know.

A supplier is great on one category and silent on another. That's why you record the category. Someone who always bids on fasteners and never replies on fittings isn't unreliable. They just don't do fittings. Keep asking them about fasteners and stop sending them the rest.

Put together, the record makes choosing who to ask a quick check. For the category you're buying, start with the suppliers who've bid recently. If that's fewer than three, add a new name or two. Leave out anyone with a long run of no replies.

The template is a spreadsheet you can download as .xlsx or .csv. It has two tabs.

Requests tab. One row per supplier per request, with the columns above. Here's what a few weeks of it might look like. All supplier names are made up.

• Only writing down the winner. The winner is the one thing you'll remember anyway. The suppliers who didn't bid, and why, are what you'll forget.
• One list for every category. A supplier can be your best bidder on fasteners and silent on electrical parts. Without a category column you'll drop a good supplier or keep pestering the wrong one.
• Dropping a supplier after one miss. People go on vacation, emails land in spam. Wait for a run, say three requests in a row with no reply.
• Keeping it in your head. If a colleague covers your requests for a week, they'll ask the suppliers who never reply, because nothing tells them not to.

The template works on its own. SourcingHQ is a sourcing assistant that uses your bid history when you set up a request.

• Who to ask. When you set up a new auction, SourcingHQ suggests suppliers from your own history, including the ones who never bid. A new account has no history yet, so the suggestions get better as you run requests.
• Your existing list. You can import your suppliers from Excel, so you don't start from nothing.
• New names. It can suggest new supplier candidates from the web based on your location, for categories where you're short. Contact details aren't always available.
• Knowing your email arrived. Invites go out in your company's name, and you can see the delivery status of each one. That helps with the "did they ever see it?" question. Suppliers bid without needing an account.
• Your team. With team access, a colleague can cover your requests.

The AI never sends, awards or contacts suppliers on its own. You choose who gets each request.

There's a free plan with 3 auction events and 1 seat, and every auction can have as many suppliers as you like. See plans and pricing.