A hospital tender is not a sale that can be accelerated by wanting it more. It opens when it opens.
The buyer is a committee
Hospital procurement in Vietnam is institutional. The decision involves pharmacy, clinical departments and finance, it is documented, and it is made against criteria that were set before your product was under discussion.
That has one useful consequence and one painful one. The useful one: a decision made this way is durable, and a product that wins a place tends to keep it. The painful one: nothing about it responds to urgency.
The work happens before the tender opens
By the time a tender is published, the specification has been written. If your product does not fit the specification, the time to have influenced it was months earlier — through the clinical departments that use it, not through procurement.
This is why "we will enter the tender" is not a plan. Entering a tender you had no hand in shaping means competing on price against products that were specified in.
Three things a principal should ask
- When does the cycle open for our category, at the institutions that matter? If a partner cannot answer that from memory, they are not working those accounts.
- What is already specified, and by whom? The incumbent is a fact, not a detail.
- What happens between tenders? The answer should not be "nothing". A year of no procurement activity is a year of clinical relationships, or it is a year of nothing at all.
Surgery is almost entirely this
Of the four categories we work in, surgical products are bought this way and effectively only this way. There is no retail route in, no way to shortcut the calendar, and no substitute for already holding the accounts when the tender opens.
