Maximising the effectiveness of the Contract Acquisition or work winning process requires all parts of the organisation to participate ...
Our Approach
Performance-leading organisations foster customer relationships through strategic insights, product and market development and on into delivery and service operations. The particular expertise that TRIMENTIS contributes is in orchestrating all these relationships, ‘hard wiring’ the knowledge and insights gained to drive the development of work winning propositions. Our Approach drives up the quality of information to better qualify opportunities, minimise risk and maximise investments as they progress through the process.
Examples of Our Capabilities
Work Winning Process Development
Customer Value Management
Proposal Development
Work Winning Process Development
The work winning process spans a complex variety of cross-functional teams from upstream activities such as marketing planning and strategic account management, on into opportunity pursuit and culminating in contract negotiation and win / loss analysis. The primary purpose of the process is to systematically motivate, direct and coordinate the efforts of a range of functional experts who contribute to the customer relationship and ultimately secure the ongoing loyalty and confidence of the market.
The whole approach is often called customer relationship management and this has tended to become a byword for technology solutions to what is clearly a knowledge and relationship based process. Technology has its place as a powerful medium to bring the appropriate knowledge to where key decisions are made, but it is worth remembering that is it merely an enabler that requires the necessary process and people disciplines for success.
Key to success is a rigorous approach to the overall process with strategic and tactical goals and roles clarified, implemented through a series of gating criteria that enable people to know where they are in the process and to drive up the quality of information and decision making. Performance leading organisations balance the need for rigour and discipline with the development of a culture that treats gating criteria as a bar to raise and exceed rather than hurdles to avoid if at all possible.
Work winning starts long before a customer has even begun to think about any particular need or opportunity. Performance leading organisations recognise this and act to secure their share of the relationship early in the process.
Proposal Development
Once market opportunities meet the bid or tender process stages having become specific and near term, Proposal Development kicks in to exploit all the knowledge and relationships potentially built up during key account management, CRM and CVM where appropriate.
TRIMENTIS helps clients both in the management of proposal development and in providing content to raise the overall quality through improved customer facing propositions, clarity around addressing key customer priorities and the provision of general subject matter expertise.
The management of proposal development is powerfully enabled through the application of the Performance Management Process, specifically focused on the Performance Review Meeting or PRM. This series of meetings clarifies the strategic priorities to be addressed, puts in place the necessary resources for success, and directs activities to meet the gating criteria of the bid or tender process.
It is the rigour, clarity, regularity, use of data and involvement of cross-functional teams in the PRM that creates conditions for success.
Customer Value Management
Customer Value Management has many definitions some of which are consistent with what we have called Strategic Account Management and Work Winning. In other words, to do with the overall process of understanding customer profitability and the pursuit of business through the development of market knowledge.
We use the term Customer Value Management or CVM to mean a very specific series of activities that seek to understand how customers make buying decisions in terms of the relative value they perceive from the various offerings in the market. How they make that choice is typically complex, not entirely self-evident and frequently not well understood even by the customer. CVM is all about unravelling this knowledge for competitive advantage.
The approach to CVM is based on surveys and interviews with individual customers and/or key influencers and decision makers in the customer organisation. Through a process of structured enquiry, attributes that make up the buying criteria are revealed along with their relative importance and crucially, the perceived performance of the supplier and their most important competition from the viewpoint of the customer. Information is developed to produce actionable data through econometric modelling so that strategic, tactical and service capabilities can be designed and further fine tuned to achieve maximum success.
Our Testimonials
Money well spent; really I am not just saying that. You really do inspire confidence and deliver effective messages.
A complex task delivered on time and on budget; thank you for helping to clarify our way forward as a business. At a personal level I have also learnt a great deal from you.
I learnt a great deal from TRIMENTIS about how to turn my sense of what the future could be into a strategy that captured the attention and enthusiasm of my colleagues.
Until we were taken through this process, we hadn’t fully appreciated the potential for our business. This experience has instilled a new excitement in the team although I must say it is tinged with some trepidation.
Our business plan was to an impressive City investors standard that enabled our internal stakeholders … my bosses … make their critical investment decisions confidently, job done thank you!
I appreciated the non-confrontational yet rigorous manner in which this study was undertaken. Thank you for delivering the result quickly and professionally.
We carried the changes through positively, managing the conflict between our internal customer satisfaction and initial delivery, establishing a new era of trust versus the control that went before.
I cannot overstate how profound this journey has been for me. I can only thank my personal coach for the care and insight they have brought to this. Truly life changing, thank you.
We have enjoyed an excellent working relationship and you have made a significant impact on our performance as a team. The bottom line is worth over £10 million to us. I am very grateful for the experience.
This important result in our CAT3 supplier assessment will not only lead directly to a positive contribution to the bottom line, but will also have a tangible lasting impact on our effectiveness as an organisation.
We were impressed that you managed to get nearly 100% attendance at the review meetings although certain findings have not sat well with some of our senior managers. This feels like a really good opportunity to kick-start our efforts.
In hours we accomplished what normally takes weeks of meetings. We developed a clearer vision about what our project was to achieve and this was more widely shared than normal.
This initially inflicted a lot of pain on the business as we literally shut down whole sales teams to focus our efforts on the strategic priorities. Time has proven our severe decisions to be the right ones and now we can all look forward to a more stable future together.
We had already set ourselves the stretch goal of achieving a top place in the J D Power survey. We had to do many things including process development work to achieve our goals, much of it to do with cultural changes. I’m very grateful for the experience TRIMENTIS has brought to us.
I would like to thank you for helping during what has been a very stressful time. Having returned from short term leave as thoughtfully advised by yourselves, I am now back on top of the job and making good progress.
We have worked together for about 2.5 years on a variety of assignments ranging from interim management, process management, team development through to work on the overall strategy and operational planning process. I am delighted to recommend them to you.
I was very sceptical when we started out on this work, trying to bring together functions that had been pulling in different directions for so long. I think we were all surprised in the end to see just how powerful it is to get people together on a regular basis to simply talk about the priorities.
Some of us had been focused on IT as the solution to our knowledge management requirements. However, it became clear that we were missing the people dimension in our thinking and I believe we now have a good chance to bring everyone together on one way forward for a change.
The immediate benefit of implementing the platform has been in helping us to rapidly gain visibility and control of a critical business programme enabling us to deliver on time and in budget, and ultimately to create value for our client.
Find out more about how we turn Priorities into Results …
Learn More
Learn more about our expertise in the rigorous use of management and leadership best practice, and how we help get the most out of an organisations processes, people and knowledge through our systematic, results oriented approach called Performance Leadership.
Client Success Stories
Learn how we have worked with clients to achieve significant results through our client success stories. Each client success story illustrates how we have helped define client priorities, what approach the team took and the results the client achieved … turning priorities into results.
Start using Performance Leadership
To start using performance leadership across your organisation today get in touch with us through our Contact page. TRIMENTIS has been working with clients for nearly two decades across a range of sectors and we have supported over £9 billion worth of major infrastructure projects.