This Big 4 Consultancy’s Home Office sales team develops opportunities from when they are identified to when a formal tender process begins. During this time, they aim to get to know the buyers, understand the ‘buyer values’ (what’s important to them) and influence them to see Accenture as their strongest candidate supplier.
Following on from an Advice Cloud bid training workshop and feedback on a major bid, the Managing Director of their Public Service team recognised that their approach to pre-tender work could be improved. This led to an engagement for Advice Cloud to provide advice and guidance to improve the probability of winning a future major opportunity.
Transport infrastructure consists of both fixed installations, including roads, railways, airways, waterways, canals, and pipelines, and terminals such as airports, railway stations, bus stations, warehouses, trucking terminals, refuelling depots (including fuel docks and fuel stations), and seaports.
The Solution
Advice Cloud introduced the Home Office team to ‘capture planning’, an iterative process to improve the probability of winning. The Invitation to Tender (ITT) for the selected opportunity was still at least three months away, giving the team time to better understand the buyer’s objectives and priorities and get the client well-positioned and valued in advance.
During an initial capture planning workshop, Advice Cloud worked through a qualification checklist to understand the status of the opportunity. This exercise covered:
- Authority and emotion: understanding the buyers involved, their roles, values and attitudes towards this Big 4 Consultancy.
- Need and solution: understanding the project aims, underlying issues and requirements, and how their company would address these.
- Money: buyers’ thoughts on budget, value and affordability and their thoughts on a price to win.
- Time: information about the contract length and transition journey.
- Competition: the strengths and weaknesses of the companies that the client would need to beat.
- Compelling story: how they are different from and better than its competitors.
Using this information, Advice Cloud developed a series of Capture Actions to form the basis of a capture plan for the company to implement.
Over the following three months, Advice Cloud provided virtual, on-demand coaching and support to keep the team focused on actions, assessing outcomes, determining whether win probability had improved and updating the capture plan. After each session, Advice Cloud documented key recommendations.
Once the tender was issued, Advice Cloud provided bid assessment support to improve the quality of the written submission.
The Results
This Big 4 Consultancy went on to win the opportunity. The team lead commented that Advice Cloud’s “coaching and support has been truly invaluable.”
The team now feels fully equipped to implement a structured approach to capture planning on new opportunities.