Sales Improvement

Bid & proposal

Excellent bid leadership and expert qualification processes are essential for successful outcomes – low-cost, high bid-to-win ratios.

Together with high-quality bid content, total commercial clarity, an unerring focus on client’s needs and prime negotiation skills deployed to deliver the win, at Acert we are to helping our clients achieve successful awards and transform them into long-term guaranteed revenue.

Bid leadership and flexible production capacity available to augment or take on full leadership
Associate consultants and SMEs from a wide range of disciplines and sector specialties

Full delivery and process support to improve your win results and transformations

Proposition Development

To bring a new service or solution to market requires energy, inspiration, research, investment and careful planning. For a successful test and launch, everyone in your team must be fully prepared and on peak performance at the right moment.

Let Acert Associates deliver the key elements of change planning, service or solution development, market understanding and launch support to ensure success.

Full support from concept through design to launch and in-life management
Change management, communications and SME support to underwrite program success

Relentless focus on meeting key success criteria – budgets, timelines, targets and milestones

New Service?

New Market?

Pipeline & Governance

Few organisations struggle with having too many customers… The lifeblood of any enterprise – finding them, keeping them and extending their relationship with you is a critical activity. It truly depends on rock-solid processes, cradle to grave – and a high performing CRM system.

Acert Associates sales specialists bring many years of high-earning achievement, with leadership and consulting skills to match. Acert can help with tactics, strategy or sales leader/ownership.

CRM platform knowledge and automation – Salesforce, ZOHO, Hubspot and custom solutions
Assessing the sales process to tailor a plan and help meet your revenue goals
Analysis of your sales goals, challenges, team and performance to provide prioritised improvement

Implementing these plans to deliver a high-performance sales engine for well-managed & measurable top-line growth

Professional & Organisational Development

Developing the organisation and its people to function effectively is essential to progress. Improving the knowledge, skills and attitudes of staff & teams relevant to their current work and future roles enables them to develop within a constantly changing environment and deliver that essential additional performance.

An expert Acert sales associate will help evaluate your key opportunities and bring them to fruition. Fast.

Expert analysis and critical thinking on all aspects of your sales organisation and challenges
Tailored programmes, courses and services to develop and better all aspects of your sales performance

Skills, process and continuous improvement for sustained growth in today’s challenging business climate

Contract Lifecycle Management

Effective contract creation and management is an oft-neglected function that can massively improve quality and commercial outcomes for both sides – buy-side and sell-side.

From primary negotiation to quarterly review, mid-term negotiation and renewal/exit, mutual and careful collaboration will produce huge dividends.

Acert can make sure that you get it right first time, maintain the intended performance and finally ensure a clean and smooth transition – all with the help of our innovative value approach perhaps.

Process and people assessment, organisational and governance review, commercial planning
Help with all aspects of the contract lifecycle – authoring, negotiation and redlining, through to in-life and transition
We can enable you to increase speed-to-contract and delivery of the required commercial and operational improvements

Get it right

Keep it right

Transition it right

Related work

Channel management support

In building a partner network in the UK associated with its Printless service, our French client knew they would need a simple but comprehensive contract structure and content: a partnering Master Services Agreement with individual Customer Engagement Schedules, and back-to-back terms to enable partners to contract the service with their clients as well as a preliminary agreement of partnering ‘intent’, or Heads of Agreement.

Market entry for a multi-year managed service

Nearing the expiry of a 5-year IT comprehensive managed services agreement, the POA wanted assistance with market entry and scoping of replacement services, as well as a chance to compare the incumbent provider with current market offerings.

Market entry support for a major IT managed services procurement

Analysis of the IT services and infrastructure landscape at the TUC as part of our strategy development had revealed the opportunity for a broad and holistic upgrade approach, involving consolidation of several service elements. Our recommendations for market entry were endorsed by the new vCIO and sanctioned by the TUC management team. The desired outcome would be a ‘one-stop shop’ covering WAN, secure hybrid hosting, Office 365 with Skype for Business and a managed backup/DR solution in a three to five-year agreement, with built-in benchmarking, renegotiation and termination options.

IT Strategy delivery projects for a national trade unions body

Following Acert’s strategic consultancy report for the TUC in Summer 2016, the senior executive team were keen to establish the IT steering group and appoint a part-time (virtual) Chief Information Officer, as well as to commission work on the IT risk register. Earlier analysis having revealed some onerous service agreements no longer fit for purpose, there was also an appetite to negotiate early savings where possible.

Service development consulting in EMEA for a global printer and managed solutions provider OEM

Well-known in the middle market for business printers, our client was gearing up to move into managed document solutions, with a wider range of multi-function devices, software and an associated go-to-market strategy. Project lead Javier Lopez needed external assistance with research in order to benchmark country capability across the in-scope markets and with sales operational materials, including Service Catalogue and collateral, partner and customer agreements.

Sales improvement in IT managed services

Our client is a £100m pa managed services business. While their responses to formal RFP documents were solid and demonstrably successful, they had identified that a proportion of their sales teams often struggled to structure and write ’freeform’ sales proposals.

Improving the speed to contract for CNS Group

CNS is a leading UK provider of Information Assurance and IT Security services and solutions. Its clients vary in size, from FTSE 100 and large public sector organisations to SMEs. Following significant period of growth in the size and scope of the services that it offered, CNS realised that its standard agreements needed a comprehensive overhaul.

Interim commercial management for a major international outsourcing organisation

Our client was struggling to find sufficient resources to provide commercial support for an influx of new bids and recent successful sales. Based on previous successful engagements with this client, Acert was selected to provide an interim commercial manager to augment the existing commercial team. Our consultant was embedded into a series of bid teams (the majority of which were to prove successful) and was then retained to manage the contract drafting and negotiation of a £40m+ IT outsource engagement.

Managed Print for a London hospitals group

Acert’s initial work on spend analysis with this London-based private hospitals client had revealed a significant expenditure category in printing and copying. Further investigation established that current agreements for copiers and printers were over-extended and under-performing. The large number of individual printers in place also indicated large benefit potential from a device consolidation and managed print solution initiative.

Transforming CEVA’s Outsourcing Model

CEVA is one of the world’s leading logistics and supply-chain management companies and has over 40,000 employees spread across more than 160 countries. With a long history of outsourcing its IT Infrastructure and applications support services in a piecemeal fashion, CEVA wanted to transform all its arrangements into a single global managed services agreement. In addition, it sought to move away from all existing input-based charging models, replacing them with an outcome-based, solution oriented contract.

Steve’s skills and experience were invaluable to us in the market entry and negotiation phases of our recent managed service award here at the TUC. Going on to help hammer out the detailed contract with our partner his determined and relentless focus has enabled us to achieve a good agreement for all parties. Simon Parry, (Virtual) CIO, TUC

We know we can rely on Acert when it comes to tricky contractual negotiations needing firm, fair handling; that kind of capability and experience is years in the making and completely invaluable.. Stephen Todd, Sales Director, Karlson UK

Can we help?

Steve Pye

+44 (0)7712 050604 stephen.pye@acertassociates.com

Keith Halford

+44 (0)7808 391203 keith.halford@acertassociates.com

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