My name is Shae McEntire. I work for a sourcing software company called Talin.
Most sourcing tools pick a side.
Either they help the buyer build the packet and hope replies show up in email, or they help the supplier answer someone else's RFP and never see the event itself. Teams end up running two systems that do not talk — or one spreadsheet that tries to be both.
That is the hole Talin fills.
We are one platform for buyers and suppliers. Buyers run the event. Suppliers respond in the portal. Same event. Same record. Nobody rebuilds the comparison matrix from six inboxes.
Why the split hurts
When the buyer lives in Word and the supplier lives in email, the event has no home.
The buyer drafts sections by hand. Contacts live in a spreadsheet two owners out of date. Replies arrive as PDFs, "see attached," and a pricing tab that is missing. Scoring starts after someone spends a day making the answers look comparable.
The supplier is not trying to make that hard. They are answering the packet they got, in the format they usually use, to the inbox that asked.
Neither side is the problem. The split is.
What dual seat means in practice
On the buyer side: intake, workflow, RFx draft, supplier send, scoring, and the award decision stay with the buying team. AI can draft the slow parts. The buyer still chooses the supplier.
On the supplier side: invited suppliers open one portal, see the event, and submit a response there. They do not need a paid seat. They do not need a separate bid product to participate in your event.
That is not two products glued together. It is one event with two seats.
What this is not
It is not recruiting software. If you searched "Talin AI" and landed on talent sourcing, that is talin.ai — a different company. We are talinsource.com.
It is not software that picks the winner. Talin scores against your criteria. You award.
It is not a nine-month suite. Mid-market teams running events in Word, email, and Excel need the event to move this month.
One event we already wrote up
We ran this for a manufacturer that was still living in email. Same facts as the write-up on the site. No new numbers.
Before Talin, a fleet services event buried the three-person team in Word drafts, mixed reply formats, and spreadsheet scoring. Buyer work on that event was about 35 hours.
With Talin, buyer work on that same shape of event dropped to about 4 hours. The RFx was drafted and reviewed in minutes, not a full day. Replies came through one portal. Scores were ready for the buyer to review.
They awarded.
If you want the write-up, it is here: case study
What I would do next
If your buyers and suppliers still meet in email, you do not need another point tool for each side. You need one place for the event.
For the earlier pieces in this series, see Why RFx still lives in Word, email, and Excel and How to run an AI-assisted event without a 9-month suite.
If you want to walk a live category in 30 minutes — buyer flow and supplier reply — that is the demo.