SALES
Helping our clients increase their sales is one of our core services at Souter Point.
We have been instrumental in helping our clients win more than £1bn in new sales revenue by providing bid management, bid writing, sales training and go-to-market strategy services to help them get ahead of the competition.
We have successfully worked on bids of all sizes and levels of complexity, from leading bid responses for multi-hundred-million-pound global visa processing services to applications for Arts Council England funding worth several hundred thousand pounds. Our approach is tailored to the requirements of the bid to ensure your organisation has the best possible chance of success.
BID MANAGEMENT
Bid management is a specialist project management service, usually conducted under extreme time pressure. From our experience of managing hundreds of bids and funding applications, we bring structure and insight into your bidding process to ensure you submit a winning bid on time and with the minimum risk.
Our approach is to ensure your bid team - and business decisionmakers - are 100% aligned on your bid response and that deliverables meet required quality and time criteria, using a framework that is based on PRINCE2 Agile project management.
In our bid management services, we will create for you a suite of bid management documents to govern the bid response process, including a requirements matrix, solution overview, bid strategy, competitive analysis, bid plan, roles and responsibilities matrix and RAID log.
Using real-time online tools, we give you remote access to bid status 24/7 from any internet-connected device so you can keep updated on the latest developments.
Case Study: Contract Award for 21 Australian Biometric Collection Centres for TLScontact
TLScontact is one of the world's largest visa processing companies, and when the Australian Department of Home Affairs issued a global bid for the provision of biometric collection centres, Souter Point was appointed to manage the bid.
With an original bid deadline of just four weeks, Souter Point quickly established a bid management team that would respond to the requirements. To ensure buy-in throughout the organisation and maximise the quality of the bid response, Souter Point organised bid writing in a way that made the most efficient use of subject matter expert time, using existing corporate and sales materials as a basis for drafting the bid response and then recruiting SMEs to review and improve what was created.
This approach ensured that the SMEs who would be ultimately responsible for delivering the biometric collection centre service had a say in how they would be delivered, while using the specialist bid writing skills of the TLScontact bid team to ensure the bid was writing in a way that was compelling, 100% compliant and easy to understand.
The result was TLScontact won a contract to operate 21 Australian biometric collection centres throughout Europe and Africa, making it one of the company's single largest contracts.
Case Study: Generator North East Successful £1.3m Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation Funding Application
After having its Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) status extended during the COVID-19 pandemic, creative arts business support agency Generator North East was busy preparing its full NPO funding renewal application.
Like many organisations in the creative arts sector, Generator North East had had a challenging pandemic period, and the future of their business was highly dependent upon extending the funding they received from ACE while other growth initiatives were developed.
Souter Point was appointed to manage the funding application to ensure it met with ACE's requirements, in particularly, how the initiatives Generator North East had planned aligned with ACE's investment principles.
The funding application was a major success, with Generator North East securing almost £1.3m in funding to support musicians and others in the creative arts sector in the Northeast of England to develop their technical, professional and business skills on a pathway to a sustainable career in the creative arts industry.
BID WRITING
One of the most popular services we offer is a bid writing service to help your business respond to requests for proposal (RFP) or submit funding applications.
Using a structured approach to bid writing that has been developed over 20 years and responsible for winning more than £1bn in new business, Souter Point has an excellent track record when it comes to writing successful bids in sectors as diverse as music and the performing arts to global visa application centre outsourcing programmes.
The key to successful bid writing is planning and ensuring a clear understanding of what the bid requests and how your organisation can best help the client accomplish their goals.
When bid writing, we typically spend 25% of our time working with you to plan responses, including developing win themes, key messages and ways to 'ghost' the competition, 50% of our time drafting the bid response and 25% of our time working with you to review and enhance the responses.
Our bid writing services can be delivered alongside bid management services or as a standalone bid writing service.
Case Study: Contract Award for 122 Spanish Visa Application Centres for BLS International
BLS International is a Top 3 global company in the visa processing industry. When the single largest Schengen visa processing contract was up to renewal, BLS International appointed Souter Point to manage and write their bid response.
Working with BLS International's Spanish partner, Souter Point developed the high-level solutions for the project and divided the work between the parties to ensure the best allocation of subject matter expertise. Souter Point was responsible for bid writing the sections on customer service, website, contact centre, people, programme management, payments systems, operations, incident response and the operational aspects of biometric data collection, document scanning and service management.
Souter Point also provied a final 'red review' of the entire bid submission to ensure that the bid response sections drafted by the Spanish partner were consistent with the high-level solutions.
The result was a sucessful contract award for BLS International to establish 122 Spanish visa application centres in 40 countries, with a 5-year contract worth upwards of GBP 150m.
SALES TRAINING
Sales is a process and when approached correctly, can be an extremely rewarding and exciting activity. But when done haphazardly or without a system, sales can quickly turn into a living nightmare fuelled by fear of rejection, feelings of inadequacy and little sense of direction.
We help our clients salespeople overcome their sales anxieties through structured sales training, giving them a repeatable 10-step process to follow along with templates, scripts and other resources so that they can make a success of their sales activities.
The foundation of our sales training is our Outstanding Outreach workshop, a one-day bootcamp for those who are new to sales or who would like a clear, repeatable process to follow that gets results.
At Souter Point we can also provide sales coaching and ongoing support to your sales team, which can help you establish the right behaviours and culture across your sales organisation.
Case Study: Outstanding Outreach delivered to a cohort of creative arts professionals
As part of a innovative business skills development programme for creative professionals in the northeast of England, Souter Point delivered an Outstanding Outreach sales training workshop to a chort of handpicked beneficiaries.
Outstanding Outreach was selected by a local third-sector organisation as an introductory sales training workshop to provide creative professionals with a structured system to expand their businesses. As a cohort more focused on creativity than business, Outstanding Outreach covered subject areas that were new to many of the attendees.
The clear 10-step structure of the workshop meant it was easy to follow in bite-size sessions, with frequent breaks for small group or individual working and attendee participation to share learning.
Outstanding Outreach has been designed to be fully accessible for the neurodivergent and makes use of multiple delivery techniques to cater for different types of learner.
100% of attendees stated that they were confident Outstanding Outreach would help them achieve their sales goals 'well' or 'extremely well', while 80% of attendees would 'highly recommend' the course to others in their situation.
GO-TO-MARKET STRATEGIES
There are many ways an organisation can enter a new market and at Souter Point we can support you with making the best choice to achieve your business objectives.
Our go-to-market strategy work covers a range of activities designed to identify new market entry options, critically evaluate the choices on offer and quantify the expected returns to your business as a result of a successful market entry.
It is essential to have a deep understanding of a market before a go-to-market strategy is created, including the key drivers, historical and forecasted growth rates, major competitors and potential partners or suppliers. Understanding the client base and how they contract is also essential.
Souter Point can prepare comprehensive go-to-market strategies for your business if you are considering entering new markets, whether they be new geographical markets or new verticals. Our go-to-market strategy report can form the basis of your new market entry, which we can then support in a further piece of work through our Business Transformation services.
As part of the service delivery strand of our go-to-market services, we can also produce sales materials and provide sales training to your team so that they have artefacts and a structured process for getting results in your new market fast.
Case Study: Supporting The Boston Consulting Group develop new market entry options for VFS Global
As the world's largest visa processing company, VFS Global, was emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, it sought external expert advice on how to insulate its business from any future downturn in the global travel industry through diversification. Strategy consultancy The Boston Consulting Group was one of the organisations pitching to the VFS Global executive management team to support the company with this process, and to boost their visa processing knowledge they recruited Souter Point to their pitch team.
Souter Point provided two key services to BCG. The first was to provide subject matter expertise to critically evaluate the diversification options generated by BCG show that the most impactful and deliverable ideas could be presented. Secondly, Souter Point contributed several additional ideas for VFS Global diversification, participating in the pitch to VFS Global's CEO and executive management team.
Case Study: Go-to-market strategies for entry into two new verticals by a BPO company
Souter Point was appointed by a global business process outsourcing company to develop a go-to-market strategy for entry into two new verticals. The company wanted to expand efficiently, leveraging its existing resources and capabilities to smooth the entry.
Over a six-month period, Souter point delivered seven work packages designed to equip the company with artefacts and processes needed for a successful go-to-market strategy.
As the two verticals had already been decided, Souter Point set about ensuring the company had appropriate artefacts to support a move into the new markets. To establish a baseline for what the company could deliver, a Capabilities Catalogue was created to document precisely what the company could offer. In total, 20 capabilities were documented in 300+ slides.
Secondly, a review of client and market needs was undertaken and a series of client value propositions developed to combine entries from the Capabilities Catalogue into a compelling offer for further discussion with prospects.
In parallel, sales training and coaching was provided to a new global sales team of 15 people, who had been drawn from operations and asked to expand their roles and responsibilities to conduct sales activities.
Souter Point ghostwrote three thought leadership articles that were used to start conversations on social media about how the company was addressing challenges in the new verticals, and bid materials were also written to provide a basis for creating a proposal for prospective clients when sufficient interest had been generated.
Finally, Souter Point create deep dive reports on three national markets for the new verticals, identifying optimal go-to-market strategies that included direct investment and partnering.
The work was successfully handed over to the business-as-usual teams and put the company in a strong position to make sales inroads into the two new verticals.