Deals in all market sectors have dramatically changed over the last 5 years. Most procurement is now ‘business-led’, with the end-client focusing on their core business and transferring non-core activities to one or more partners.
The skills needed to qualify, bid, negotiate and deliver large deals have evolved, and procurement procedures can now be an expensive and demanding process. Companies have recognised the need for specialists with a combination of management consultancy, relationship, technical, commercial and delivery skills.
Proven skills in these areas are scarce, and bidding without them leads to either a lower chance of winning, or even worse, being awarded contracts which become loss-making and unsatisfactory for all parties.
Challenges we hear from our clients include the following:
How can we bid for more opportunities in parallel?
Are we positioning ourselves early enough, or are we already disadvantaged before the bid process has even begun?
Do we have the necessary commercial skills to win profitable, deliverable business?
How do we up-skill our current sales / bid team?
Can bids be structured on more of a risk / reward basis?
Since the scale of Henderton’s involvement can ramp up or down in line with the demands of a bid, the cost of engaging us is often less than that of recruiting an in-house team of similar ability, and eliminates the risk of poor recruitment decisions.
Our advisors have all had more than 15 years’ experience of running and winning bid processes and negotiations, cumulatively working on hundreds of bids, ranging from small consultancy assignments through to multi-million strategic contracts.
We help clients to win strategic deals, from new market entries to contracts worth hundreds of millions. We do this by developing better relationships, sales strategies, bid responses and commercial negotiation positions than the competitors.
This mean optimising:
Relationships: early shaping, scoping and positioning.
Sales strategies: ensuring responding to customer needs more competitively.
Bid responses: developing the winning solution.
Commercial negotiations: closing the deal and delivery transition.
Our end-to-end bid support helps clients win new large contracts or prevent competitors from taking on core services. We become part of your team from the start – and lead, manage, review, coach, write, design, model and present to get the job done.
We have particular expertise in financial services and information technology, but our approach is equally applicable to any business-to-business environment. Our approach is always to ensure that the contract is good business, achieving a positive, win-win outcomes for all involved.
We approach the whole end-client engagement in a structured manner, helping you to build engagement mapping models to ensure that all levels of your organisation present the right messages at the right time. Simultaneously, we coach and steer the engagement processes with your sales, delivery and management teams to enable them to develop long-term relationships.
Our support varies depending on your needs, as well as the requirements of thespecific tender opportunity. We work with you from outset to understand these needs and best design our package of support, and can include the following:
Bid management: target and milestone setting, planning of negotiation streams and strategies, orchestrating negotiation meetings and rehearsals.
Project management: resource planning, co-ordination of sales, bid, technical, commercial, financial, legal, HR, transition and delivery teams.
Flexible resource: working alongside you as a specialist, or to expand the capacity of your team.
Client strategy: detailed analysis of the end-client’s value for money considerations, critical success factors and key performance indicators, and how our client’s proposition should map onto these at each phase of the procurement cycle.
Evaluation criteria: understanding the end-client’s business drivers, predicting the evaluation criteria where they are not published, and determining how to optimise scoring.
Commercial strategy: commercial strategy and tactics, including those of consortia, and development of a bid strategy and win themes.
Qualification process: storyboarding and developing response to the Selection Questionnaire or Pre-Qualification Questionnaire.
Consortium management: partner due diligence, selection and vision setting.
Partner agreements: financial, contractual and workshare negotiations, models and agreements.
Proposal development: service model design, management summary and vision, bid writing, review, refinement and finalisation.
Key documents: developing key documents (for example, the communications plan, or partnership charter).
Financial modelling: best and final offer strategies and competitive analysis.
Presentation materials: development of visuals, handouts or presentations to support the tender submission, and external communication with stakeholders.
Negotiation support: coaching the team, rehearsals and role-plays in preparation for presentation and negotiations.
Skill transfer: skills and knowledge transfer to your internal team.
If you would like to learn more, please contact our Sales team.
To date our advisors have won more than €XXXm worth of contracts for clients across multiple industries. Selected examples include:
HSBC: XXXX
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