Services > Business Development > Winning Bids

Winning bids >

We assist our clients in the winning and delivery of long-term, profitable and sustainable business predominantly, although not exclusively, in the public sector.

Our consultants have succeeded in bids with contract values in excess of £300M. We support our clients in three key areas:

Building stronger relationships

Our experience tells us that, above all else, complex high value sales are contingent on forging strong trust-based relationships. We help our clients to avoid the hard sell approach and instead develop techniques to establish rapport and be perceived as a thought leader and trusted advisor. Selling is all about relationships and transference of feeling. All things being equal, people would rather buy from someone they know and like. This means prospective customers must know you and like you. They must know and like your organisation too. All too often, we see companies think that experience and capabilities will always win.

Sales and procurement cycle management

All but a very few successful sales outcomes start before the formal procurement process is underway. Successful sales campaigns start with findng and qualifying the right opportunities to bid for, forging relatjonships with key procurement-side contacts, helping shape requirements and the customer's view of what success looks like, and committing your organisation to do whatever it takes to win.

We identify future prospects that present the greatest likelihood of success suitable for our clients to bid for individually or as part of a consortium. We can provide timely, accurate market and competitior intelligence.

We reinforce your pre-sales efforts by:

• Rain making through our extensive industry contacts
• Finding prospects that fit your business
• Helping shape the deal and early influencing of the client's procurement strategy
• Objective qualification of the opportunity
• Providing detailed analysis and understanding of the client's buying motives, explicit and implicit needs, value for money considerations, personal motives, and how your proposition should map onto these at each phase of the procurement cycle
• Our knowledge of the environment: guiding you through the procurment process and putting in place processes and methodologies for ongoing sales campaign management
• Bid planning, resourcing and milestone setting
• Marketing support to generate leads, strengthen brand and reputation

With better qualification and targetting, you'll quickly start to get better returns from sales effort resulting in a stronger qualified pipeline and better understanding of your forecast win rates. Having pre-qualified an opportunity and being long-listed, we enter the sales zone.

Creating winning solutions

What constitutes a winning solution varies from one bid to the next. The experienced bidder will have forests of materials from previous bids, but this is of little help in the current sales scenario unless it is customised and contextualised and addresses the issues most valued to the prospect. Boilerplate material is mostly fine in the form of case studies when used to substantiate claims of capabilities and previous experience - it is less valuable in the final analysis of decision makers. They want to feel the solution has been designed for them, is expressed in their terms using their language, focuses on what matters most to them, and unambiguously meets their needs and wants.

We help:

• Pinpoint the key decision makers
• Tools and techniques to understand and influence your contacts
• Elicting information through the right questions at the right time
• Creating your win themes and value statements
• Dealing with objections
• Solution creation
• Influencing and presenting your proposals with clarity and passion
• Bid authoring
• Understanding and beating the competition
• Generating urgency and momentum in the sale cycle
• Getting the commercial offer right