THE COMPLEX SALE: HELPING YOUR CLIENTS BUY.

“The supplier was the right choice on paper. They knew what needed to done, they had done it elsewhere. We felt that they’d overwhelm our small team creating a negative effect for us internally. Nothing in their proposal addressed and alleviated this concern.”

“We had a large buying team across disciplines, which is more complicated but necessary to get this right. We needed to see the compatibility with the supplier in the RFP process to know that we would get to a new way of working. More importantly, our people needed to feel it.”

“Our buying team had a board overseeing the procurement which included C-level executives. We wanted a supplier who could demonstrate that they’ve done this work before by outlining required steps. Equally important was their confidence to raise difficult points early on so that we could collaboratively identify ways to get beyond them. Not doing so caught us by surprise in the final stage. Only then did one of our key decision factors become clear to us.”

“Our buying team is still immature in terms of selecting and managing an outside firm for large-scale projects. We tend to do these things in-house, and not always with full success. We are developing our procurement policy and its implementation. In addition to a good partner who really gets to know us, we need them to be able to bring in industrialisation and tools/techniques that we lack. This could require two collaborating firms, so we’d need to know how well they work together even before they come to us.”

“Our mood internally was linked to enormous pressure on costs. As a consequence, we took a much bigger risk in terms of shortlisting suppliers. We were trying to select partners who could help with our needed cost reduction whilst avoiding putting all of our outsourced work into one hand. One of the things which we noticed and really irked us was some of the bidding teams pandering to our boss’ boss.”

“Our team is not highly sophisticated in terms of detailing what needed to be done to accomplish our goals, so the scope of our RFP was broad. The supplier we wanted would need to be flexible and transparent in terms of costs. We were more than willing to spend the time required with the bidding teams to collaboratively shape the vision and improve everyone’s understanding of what we are about to undertake. And we appreciated any tools and preparation that helped us internally to sell our decision up the chain. Only one bidder ‘sort of’ brought this.”

“Initially we brought in an analyst firm as a client-side advisor. As the procurement went on, we ended up running the buying team fully in-house. We were really looking for collaborative work during the procurement, especially at the more technical levels, to further refine the scope and methods. Ultimately, we wanted a firm who had ‘done it and been there’ and was willing to take an outcome-based view together with us – not just come in on a time and materials basis.”