Combining AI and procurement data to help PSOs sell more to the public sector
If you redefined your approach to winning business with the public sector as if success were the only option. How successful could you be? What would it look like?
In the last decade we have seen significant growth in the number of practice areas and specialist teams inside PSO business units.
Each practice area needs to identify and win business; a responsibility increasingly shared by everyone. Today, new business is everybody’s business.
The growth in practice areas and increased specialisation has broken the traditional model for monitoring the public sector marketplace for projects to bid for and signals that indicate customer-implied needs not expressed as formal procurement projects.
Traditionally, a centrally placed person or team would monitor the marketplace for Invitations to Tender (tenders). This person would mentally match the summarised requirements in the procurement notices with a general understanding of the services offered by the organisation.
Opportunities deemed relevant are emailed to practice leader(s) for review and bid.
This setup works in a world with few tenders, less specialisation, less market complexity, less regulatory changes and compliance requirements, more uniform customer expectations and less demand for customisation.
Today the landscape is the opposite: Due to the dramatic growth of investments in public services, there are significantly more tenders. Additionally, many more organisations also fall under public procurement regulations.
There has been rapid technological change which has led to enormous opportunities to improve efficiency, productivity, security, and resilience. The need to meet the growing expectations of citizens with novel solutions has led to increasingly specialised language being used in procurement notices.
As a result, a central person or team has no chance of faithfully matching the deluge of procurement notices with the increased number of cutting-edge services being offered by practice areas.
This leads to missed opportunities and a lack of important intelligence being communicated to the practice areas and individual consultants.
Today, individual consultants at all levels need to be directly connected to the valuable intelligence that can be distilled from public procurement data.
First and foremost, individual consultants need information about tender opportunities to bid for.
But not only that. The level of useful information provided by advanced tender intelligence goes beyond a direct request for your specific service.
Procurement notices that are NOT for services your organisation supplies, can be indicators of current or future needs for services you can supply. If so, there is an excellent opportunity to start engaging with the buyer now, to establish and grow the relationship, build rapport, and help shape the future procurement.
Tenderlake enables ambitious professional service organisations to not only identify and win more public contracts but empower each consultant with the real-time information needed to be much more proactive in building relationships with new and existing prospects.
When it comes to configuring searches that capture relevant procurement notices, the traditional approach of searching for keywords and/or CPV codes leads to many missed opportunities.
Every day, relevant procurement notices are published where the buyer describes what they want to buy, using words and phrases that are different to those we were expecting the buyer to use, and classified using wrong or very generic CPV codes.
Tenderlake solves this problem by taking advantage of the AI revolution and by offering AI Search.
Tenderlake AI Searches transforms any description of a service offering or individual expertise into meaning, which is matched with the meaning of procurement notices.
This enables Tenderlake to identify opportunities that are relevant to a description of a business unit, practice area or individual specialism, even if there are no shared words or phrases in the two descriptions.
Every stakeholder who receives procurement notices has the opportunity to provide feedback on whether a notice is relevant to be aware of or not.
Based on this feedback, Tenderlake trains a predictive model which is individual to each user. This helps Tenderlake provide each consultant with individual recommendations of additional procurement notices that are likely to be relevant to their interests, even if these procurement notices are not matched with any of the organisation’s searches.
Together with the ability to learn from each consultant's feedback, Tenderlake provides the very best safety net to ensure that no relevant opportunities are missed.
The business case for an ambitious maximalist approach to selling professional services to the public sector is almost always very positive.
Given the typical size of public sector contracts, most organisations will be able to make a positive business case even if they only win one additional public sector contract because of this new approach every five years.
While this is not the result to aim for it puts into perspective that there is no reason for not providing the intelligence for an ambitious approach.
Even if a new win can be small in initial size, it may be the start of a new important relationship and a precursor to much more sizable contracts.
We have observed again and again, how an ambitious maximalist approach has resulted in a surge in motivation among those responsible for winning new business.
Contact us for an informal discussion about how Tenderlake can help.
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