Buyers are human beings too

Don’t believe the myths and the rumours. Instead understand the basic rules that the buyer is advised to follow!

There are plenty of myths around public sector procurement. You’ve probably heard a couple – like you need inside “connections” or that the big firms have it all “stitched-up”.

These are born out of trying to explain away why firms can be successful in the private sector but can’t get their mojo working on G-Cloud.

Our advice is, don’t believe the myths and the rumours. Rather, believe that the rules are applied without deviation, not only because our research has found that this is true in most cases, but hey! it’s daft to figure a sales strategy on the contrary view.

 

If you want to sell on G-Cloud, it’s critical that you understand the basic rules that the buyer is advised to follow in the Buyer’s Guide:

 

1. Prepare your requirements – a list of ‘must-haves’ and ‘wants’ – and get approval to buy what you need.

2. Search for services on the Digital Marketplace using keywords.

3. Review services and apply the filters to create your shortlist.

4. Evaluate your options to find the cheapest or best value for money.

They need to keep an audit trail of all their actions, buy fairly, and can be asked to show how they came to their procurement decision at any time by the Mystery Shopper service.

 

How Advice Cloud can help:
We have been using G-Cloud as buyers this since it’s first iteration and have bought £ms worth of services from it. We know how the G-Cloud works! Email us for your free consultation. 

 

Sounds simple enough. But it’s not. It’s a mammoth task.

-A search using keywords can return hundreds of options, which the buyer can whittle down by filtering according to their requirements, but which could still leave them with dozens of choices.

-Faced with the scope of this task, any reasonable person is going to check if a service provider meets basic requirements before they begin to evaluate their service.

-Even after doing that there’s likely to still be a long, long list to get through. So assume that the buyer makes their shortlist without using any information outside of the G-Cloud catalogue – no picking up the phone, following links to external websites or Googling for more information.

So, now you’ve got a little bit of an understanding into this person and their buying challenge, let’s take a look at your listing from their perspective.

To download Buyers are human being too please click here. 

 

Our think piece series on what it takes to become a G-Cloud winner is part of our partnership with Lindsay Smith from GCloudSales.UK. 

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Copyright © 2016 Rowallan International Ltd. All rights reserved.
Published by Advice Cloud under licence.