Tracking public tenders as a sales signal: TenderNed in your CRM

A published public tender is buying intent with a deadline: a contracting authority publicly announces that budget exists, what is being procured, and the closing date by which bids must be submitted. Few sales signals are this explicit. The buyer states outright that they will buy, and when. For bid teams, every publication is direct pipeline; for subcontractors and suppliers, every award points to a winner who has to start delivering in the coming months. Yet most teams treat TenderNed as a search engine someone checks manually now and then, not as a structured feed that fills the CRM automatically. That costs deals, because in public procurement the first mover wins.

Two events, two playing fields

Tracking tenders produces two commercially useful moments, and they serve different players.

The publication (tender_published) is the starting gun. There is a contract on the table, the budget exists, and the closing date sets the pace. For bid teams this is the classic use case: every relevant publication in view, filtered by region, sorted by deadline, so the bid/no-bid decision is made while there are still weeks left, not days. But a publication also says something about the contracting authority itself: this organization is actively procuring. For agencies and vendors selling to the public sector, that is an account signal in its own right, independent of the specific contract.

The award (tender_awarded) tells you who won the contract, and it is the most underused sales signal in the entire chain. The winner has just landed work and now has to deliver: people, equipment, software, subcontracting. The best day to approach a contractor is the day after they win a contract. You know what they will be executing, for whom, and that the financing is in place. Subcontractors and suppliers who track awards systematically call at exactly that moment. The rest of the market only notices once the construction signs go up.

Why TenderNed is open data (and what it still lacks)

TenderNed publishes Dutch public procurement notices as open data; the Dutch Public Procurement Act (Aanbestedingswet) mandates it. Publications and awards alike, including contracting authorities and closing dates. But public is not the same as usable. The raw data is fragmented, inconsistently formatted and not linked to companies, so you cannot simply build a CRM workflow on top of it.

Slicegraph pulls TenderNed daily, cleans the publications and classifies them as signals: currently 565 tender events across 246 regions, within a total dataset of 9,817 signals across 523 regions. Every signal links back to the source document, and every region is a consistent slug (amsterdam, utrecht) you can filter on. Which sources we use and how we handle the GDPR is fully documented on Data sources & compliance.

A TenderNed alert is not signal tracking

Many teams search for "TenderNed alerts" and end up with email notifications. Better than nothing, but they remain loose emails in an inbox: no structured fields, no region filters you control yourself, no link to a company or KvK number, and nothing you can route programmatically. Tender signal tracking means something else: every event as a structured record (type, title, region, date, source link, company resolution) delivered through a channel your workflow understands. API for pull, webhook for push, CSV for those who work in spreadsheets. Then "tracking tenders" stops being a task on someone's Friday-afternoon list and becomes a feed that keeps itself up to date.

Walkthrough: filtering TenderNed signals and piping them into your CRM via webhook

Here is how to set it up. You need an API key (included with every plan) and an endpoint that can receive webhooks: your own service, or a tool like Make, n8n or Zapier.

Step 1: filter the signals via the API. All tender signals live in the procurement family. For example, fetch every publication since the start of the month:

curl -s "https://slicegraph.com/api/v1/signals?family=procurement&type=tender_published&region=nl&since=2026-08-01&limit=50" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SLICEGRAPH_API_KEY"

Each item contains id, family, type, title, region, occurred_at, url (the source document), company_id, company_name, kvk_number and a payload with source details. Want awards only? Set type=tender_awarded. Want a single municipality? Use its region slug (region=amsterdam). limit accepts 1–200 and you paginate with cursor.

Step 2: set up a webhook subscription. Instead of polling yourself, let new signals come to you:

curl -s -X POST "https://slicegraph.com/api/v1/subscriptions" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SLICEGRAPH_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"target_url":"https://hooks.jouwdomein.nl/slicegraph","filter":{"families":["procurement"],"regions":["nl"]}}'

Every delivery is HMAC-SHA256-signed via the X-Slicegraph-Signature header, so you can verify the message really came from us, and failed deliveries are retried automatically. The full parameter reference lives in the API docs.

Step 3: route into your CRM. From here it is your workflow: create a deal or task per signal, sort publications by closing date so the most urgent sits on top, and assign regions to the right account executive. Route awards to the team that approaches winners. Prefer not to build webhooks? The Feed plan also delivers a weekly CSV, and the API works directly as an enrichment source in Clay.

Curious what the signals look like before you build anything? The live feed shows the most recent publications coming out of the pipeline.

Stronger in combination

Tenders are one family of three. The same pipeline delivers permit signals, covering applied-for and granted construction and environmental permits such as the permits in Amsterdam, plus new Peppol registrations in the Netherlands, interesting for anyone selling software or accounting services. A contractor who wins an award and applies for a permit shortly after is a warmer account than either signal on its own. The Feed plan (€99/month) covers one family of your choice; Growth (€149/month) includes all families across NL + BE. Details are on the pricing page.

Try it with your ICP

Every plan starts with a free sample feed. Email hello@slicegraph.com and tell us who you sell to: regions, type of contracts, publications or awards. Within two business days you will receive a first slice with real TenderNed signals for your target audience. No demo environment, just the data you would actually be calling on.