Maximising the effectiveness of the Contract Acquisition process requires all parts of the organisation to
participate …

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 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.

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.

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.