Understanding Buyer Behaviour – How to Win Tenders and Influence Prospects Why does understanding buying behaviour and key drivers keep businesses ahead of competition? Why use external support to understand these challenges? Many debrief meetings are attended by bid teams or a representative who has supported the engagement process. As a result client prospects can be reticent to reveal their true feelings towards the group. How then can you gain further understanding of the decision process and overcome situations where procurement teams hide behind their hard scoring criteria? Deploying an independent third party to undertake independent research in this area amongst your clients and prospective clients can provide valuable understanding, reducing abortive bid preparation costs and improving your chances of success in future tenders. Specific examples of outcomes emerging from this type of research include better understanding of: The economic climate we are operating in today places all kinds of pressures on business; the order book being the key area of focus. Our Buying Behaviour research solution provides insight and understanding of customer/prospect motivations and enables organisations to achieve better value from business development and tendering activities. Organisations seeking to work either in the Public Sector or when tendering for high value contracts will typically be required to respond via a formal tender process. Gaining understanding of your prospects soft relationship expectations, formal engagement requirements, drivers of trust and the hidden factors which influence contract awards is highly desirable. Uncovering these areas enables development of high quality tender responses and effective relationship building from early engagement. Post tender debrief sessions are frequently driven by responses to hard criteria set out in invitation to tender documents and do not reveal the real background – seldom do these reveal the realistic picture of why a prospect has chosen not to work with you. We can help uncover the decision making not included in the award criteria and provide greater depth of insight.  Partnership behaviours (sharing information, dealing and managing change)  Quality of social relationships (supportive behaviours)  Co-operation around unforeseen issues (listening to both sides)  Compromise (give and take)  Citizenship (tolerance and going the extra mile)  Staff behaviour (uninterested, unenthusiastic, argumentative) Developing a more comprehensive understanding of how your client prospects regard your organisation and your front-line business development teams approach to winning business from them is significantly valuable. Independent research using contemporary techniques to analyse results can provide this. Outputs can determine which areas in your business development and bid response process are underperforming, providing clear guidance on where and how to improve your business win success rate. TTi (Europe) Ltd – Registered in England no: 06691266 – VAT number: 947 0187 10 Registered Office: 6 Olympus Court, Olympus Avenue, Tachbrook Park, Warwick, CV34 6RZ, UK Page 1 of 2 How does TTi Global support the process? What is the return on investment? TTi Global has supported businesses and organisations in the Construction, Business Services, Automotive and Financial Sectors to better understand buying behaviours and motivators. Ultimately the investment in conducting research of this type can be assessed through the improvement actions an organisation takes to support future tendering and selling activity. The ability of an organisation to act on identified deficiencies and make changes quickly are the key drivers of ROI. Our research solutions are scalable according to the number of tenders submitted, sector and size of organisation. Some common themes we reveal are: How well customer needs are listened to and reflected in bid / proposal response The importance of gender mix in a bid team Attitude and enthusiasm demonstrated by the team Organisational strengths and weaknesses How reliable a business is perceived to be in the market place Expected areas of partnering such as trust, honesty and integrity Your reputation in the market place Comparison with competition (providing competitive advantage) The research is not prescriptive and is appropriately designed to meet business objectives and support understanding from different customer types. One-to-one business interviews are conducted by senior staff with appropriate commercial knowledge, sector understanding and business management experience to elicit understanding of challenges and issues that can be effectively interpreted, actioned and incrementally improved. Improved win rates, higher referrals from customers and greater client retention/loyalty are all metrics which can give clear evidence of organisational improvement. Next Steps If you would like to find out more about the research approaches we can deploy to achieve more from your business development and tendering activities please contact: Glyn Luckett Account Development Director [email protected] +44 (0) 1753 214038 TTi (Europe) Ltd – Registered in England no: 06691266 – VAT number: 947 0187 10 Registered Office: 6 Olympus Court, Olympus Avenue, Tachbrook Park, Warwick, CV34 6RZ, UK Page 2 of 2