While Alexander Suvorov has provided us with a smorgasbord of motivational quotes, “Train hard, fight easy” from The Art of Victory in 1965 is one that resonates with everyone who has engaged in competition.
The decision to enter a tendering process, is one that should not be undertaken lightly. They require a significant investment in time and energy to compete. I still vividly remember the feeling of dread, and hearing groans across the office when learning that a new tender had been announced, and knowing we needed to win.
I also remember how much better it felt, as I started to structure our approach, saving time and more importantly, taking our win rate to over 75%.
Market Analysis
The first part of building this structure was a comprehensive market analysis. Analysing the contracts that our potential customers had with other suppliers provided an essential view on the market:
-
- What products and services were purchased?
-
- What was the contract duration?
-
- What features were important?
-
- How was service delivered?
-
- What did it cost?
Building Customer Relationships
Lots of your potential customers will be open to discussion around their current contracts, including how implementation went, what value for money they perceive and their emerging requirements. They may also confirm current contract performance metrics, when re-tendering is due to take place, and any procurement frameworks that they will use for this.
If your potential customer is a government body, they have a responsibility to publish all spend data over £20,000, and to respond to freedom of information requests within 20 working days and this can be a key source of data to help complete your analysis.
Recent Awards
Reviewing the most recent awards in your market is a great resource for understanding what types of customers are currently purchasing and what they’re buying. This includes details of product and service features, contract durations and importantly their value. You can quickly see who the most successful suppliers are to help prioritise your competitor analysis and provide this information as input to your development process.
Analysis of competitors includes understanding their size, turnover, products and services (features, benefits, quality), market positioning, marketing strategy, pricing, distribution, customer perception & satisfaction, financial performance, and strengths and weaknesses.
Our Results
Evaluating these aspects of our competitors helped us understand how we could differentiate ourselves and create compelling unique selling points for our customers. This led to us having a 75% success rate for tenders in one market and over 80% in another…
– We trained hard to make the fight a little easier.
