Business Growth Programme – Alpha Omega Securities

A collaborative, results-driven partnership

Through continuous improvement and a pursuit of excellence, we’ve developed a collaborative team that consistently succeeds.

Alpha Omega got in touch with Bespoke Bids in January 2017 with an objective to improve their bidding win rates, on an upcoming pipeline of both new business opportunities and contract renewals.

Alpha’s bidding history was laced with frustration around complicated and time-consuming process, which often led to no reward. Alpha were looking for a partner who would simplify the process, whilst maximising senior management’s time.

Information Capture

The more we spoke with Alpha’s team during our Discovery stage, the more we unearthed that an excellent service was being delivered to their clients but the challenge was to document this evidence and show this capability to prospective clients.

We began an information gathering project to formulate an evidence-rich bid library, to maintain and improve as the partnership progressed.

Process Optimisation

We also analysed the bid process which was implemented to date and rather than ‘re-inventing the wheel’ went about making changes to optimise the potential evaluation score which could be achieved. This was something we would continue to do after each project together, reviewing the people, processes and collateral available and continuously applying improvements and efficiencies which were bespoke to Alpha’s business.

Qualification

Having reviewed the bid pipeline that had been identified, we assisted with qualifying these opportunities and deciding on the best use of resource, deciding to not bid on projects we did not believe we had a high chance of success on.

Bid Projects

When the qualified bids started to land, we worked closely with Alpha, creating a bespoke win strategy and bid plan for each, to make the best use of the time available and optimise scoring.

We structured our a best-practice response to every quality question, focusing on the questions posed, the specification and (most importantly) the evaluation criteria.

We identified the areas of the bid where we had little information and prioritised defining how we would capture this information (such as interviewing a manager at a particular client site).

We applied our 4 stage ISO9001-accredited review process to every bid, using the skills available within our team to scrutinise the bid against the evaluation criteria and look for ways to improve every response.

After each bid was submitted, we conducted a washup/lessons learned session with the team to seek constructive feedback we could apply to future bid projects.

Results

Due to hard work, effective collaboration and application of proven processes, the results soon followed, achieving 8 contract wins in the first two years of working together. Each bid project we delivered together, we managed to learn from and apply this learning into the next project making each bid less time consuming for Alpha personnel as our library of high scoring content developed.

Fast forward six years and we have worked in with Alpha to achieve many wins, big and small, including a multi-million pound local authority contract for which Alpha were successful in all four service lots.

Alpha Omega are now the longest serving client at Bespoke Bids and since working together Alpha have seen their revenues double and they are continuing to grow at a highly impressive rate.

“We have a great relationship with the Bespoke Bids team and the partnership continues to work very effectively.”

Ken Lawton, Managing Director

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Note – Social Value

Social Value can constitute up to 20% of the overall score for a bid. From our experience of working with SMEs, this was always a problem area where clients struggled to come up with real commitments they had either delivered or would commit to deliver. Much to Alpha’s credit, their Managing Director Ken Lawton delivers social value in abundance including being on the committee of the local small business network, sponsoring local sports teams and launching the Alpha Omega Women Peace and Security (WPS) Foundation.