There’s currently an emphasis on improving the UK’s procurement environment. The ‘Transforming public procurement’ green paper writes that the ‘current regimes for awarding public contracts are too restrictive with too much red tape for buyers and suppliers alike, which results in attention being focused on the wrong activities rather than value and transparency’.
‘This stifles innovation and deters small businesses and start-ups from ever bidding for public contracts. We can get rid of duplication and bureaucracy, making the system more agile and flexible while still upholding fair and open competition.’
In short, there’s more opportunity for businesses to win government contracts. To win these contracts, you need to prepare. In this blog, we’ll cover how you can create a winning public sector sales strategy.
Procurement isn’t known to be a fast process, so developing workflows is the way to go. These will help you stick to a templated process for each stage of the sales process.
In many cases, sales teams can turn to workflow automation software to keep track of their bids. For example, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics are software applications that help track engagement and customer information.
One useful thing to remember is tracking public sector sales in Excel is old-fashioned and disconnected, meaning any data isn’t properly visible across a sales team. This type of working will do nothing for your strategy.
Public sector organisations demand their contract suppliers are clued up on their business, needs and the wider atmosphere of their industry. Be it transport, construction, healthcare or IT; there’s a vast universe of nuance, background info and untapped resources private companies need to utilise.
The sales teams that manage bids will often be tasked to bid for multiple contracts at once, which can mean a lot of information needs to be gathered. Whether it’s routine office supply or a multi-million-pound transport contract, this is a crucial task and can make the difference between understanding the needs of a contract and completely missing the mark.
Your research needs to involve all the stakeholders within a contract, from mayors, city planners, transport officials, healthcare professionals, CIOs and many more. Similarly, if you can, look into what the stakeholders have been involved with in the past to glean any key insights that could improve your chances.
This kind of intelligence can help sales representatives, sales teams and bid writers to more accurately develop a bid, leveraging those all-important contextual insights to inform their work.
Public sector sales strategies need to be grounded in data. This isn’t just about looking into the data surrounding a specific bid opportunity, but it also requires sales teams to develop strategies that capitalise upon historical data, like previous bid results, contract turnout and market changes.
Similarly, historical data will aid when working to understand pricing sensitivity over time and past contracts’ efficacy from a regional perspective. You can look into where you and others have been successful in both industry and location and potentially predict where market gaps will arise.
The types of sales data you could be analysing in order to improve performance could be:
In this day and age, procurement sales can be data-driven, utilising the above metrics (and others) to inform sales decisions, such as lead prospecting to pricing changes.
Using data helps to save time by determining the areas and clients that you should be targeting. For example, it can show you which areas and markets aren’t buying what you’re selling, doing away with the need to target everywhere in a useless ‘spray and pray’ practice. A data-driven approach to a sales strategy has been seen to make a business up to 6% more profitable than competitors.
On top of this, you can also access the sales data from within Contracts Finder, which is a real goldmine of information. There’s a vast array of information that covers what is being bought and who is buying it, alongside data relating to finding partners and checking up on contracts.
For example, the Digital Marketplace sales are all published, where you can see what types of contracts have been published and awarded.
Essentially, studying the past will help inform your strategy when preparing for the future, helping to improve your wins and begin to score even bigger contracts than before.
There are several unwritten rules for selling to the public sector. Here’s what you must not do:
On the other side, here are the things you must do:
Public sector procurement is an increasingly lucrative opportunity for businesses - the key is knowing how to discover contracts and make connections. To do so, attend our virtual summit, the Public Sector Show 2021.
Want to learn more about the public sector procurement process and win more public sector business? Download the Public Procurement Playbook.
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