How to Win Large Outsourcing Opportunities for Professional Sales People

By Frank van Riemsdijk

As a sales professional in the Outsourcing Services Industry, would you not like to be successful in your job? I think everybody wants that. But how can you be constantly successful, and what is success? Success in our world is being a winner. In other words, just winning opportunities on and on. Is that feasible? Yes, it is. As an international sales professional who is still working for more than 20 years in this industry and is very successful, some old colleagues even called me the best in the industry, it was, for me, the time to put my practical real-life experiences on paper and to share with you why I have always been very successful in winning large outsourcing opportunities. It is a practical book and purely written from real-life experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley
• Release date: Aug 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463065969

Frank van Riemsdijk

An International award-winning Regional Sales Director, who has expertise and proven successful track record of growing and delivering revenue, big ticket sales and profitability in continually evolving in competitive markets. His expertise has been garnered by working for some of the world’s leading names in the Business Service, BPO and Information Technology arena. Having worked for Logica (now CGI), Hewlett Packard, IBM, Olivetti, TMF Group and now for Equinox, a Business Outsourcing provider covering Africa, Europe, Middle East and America. A true leader with the ability to engage both internal and external stakeholders, transforming businesses to ensure customer expansion, retention and satisfaction.

Book preview

An international award-winning Regional Sales Director who has expertise and proven successful track record of growing and delivering revenue, big ticket sales and profitability in continually evolving in competitive markets. His expertise has been garnered by working for some of the world’s leading names in the Business Service, BPO and Information Technology arena. Having worked for Logica (now CGI), Hewlett Packard, IBM, Olivetti, TMF Group and now for Equinox, a Business Outsourcing provider covering Africa, Europe, Middle East and America. A true leader with the ability to engage both internal and external stakeholders, transforming businesses to ensure customer expansion, retention and satisfaction.

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my wife, Ann. I met her the first time at a coffee machine at IBM in Amsterdam, and from that moment, it was love at first sight. She was the one who came up with the idea and encouraged me to write a book about sharing my practical sales experiences on how to win large outsourcing opportunities.

Frank van Riemsdijk

How to Win Large Outsourcing Opportunities for Professional Sales People

Copyright © Frank van Riemsdijk (2018)

The right of Frank van Riemsdijk to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with section 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781788482691 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781788482707 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781788482714 (E-Book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published (2018)

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd™

25 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

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E14 5LQ

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank all my previous employers and colleagues for whom I worked for or worked with, who gave me the possibility to work on so many interesting opportunities in many foreign countries and where I had the opportunity to work with all kind of different nationalities with different professional working backgrounds.

I have written this book especially for professional sales people in the outsourcing industry. I have been working for more than 20 years in this industry with enormous success. In my world, I am known as the ‘the guy who has never lost a deal’, which is a great compliment to me.

Many people and colleagues have asked me over the years the key to my success. This is what led me to write a book on how to win large Outsourcing deals. I am especially focussing on large (complex) opportunities, because those types of opportunities are the most challenging in the industry. Now large has a different definition in each company. I worked for worldwide well-known outsourcing companies like IBM, HP, Logica (now CGI) on international deals starting from $90M through $B2.5 Total Contract Value (TCV) but also at TMF-Group, with international multi-countries opportunities of $1M to $5M TCV. As you can see, the sizes can be different for each company and the sizes have been changing in some market segments, but the complexity and, therefore, the challenge of winning these opportunities is still there.

This book is all about tips and techniques of how to become successful in your job as professional sales person in the outsourcing space. Nothing is written about technical solutions but more why clients are outsourcing, how do you realise that you have a real outsourcing opportunity and what are the next steps to win it. You will see that I have not used any reference material but that it is all written out of my practical experience from the many years I was engaging these opportunities not only in my own country, but also in countries/regions like UK, France, USA, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Austria, Africa, Eastern Europe.

Introduction

Why do clients outsource?

What kind of large outsourcing engagements are there in the market place?

How to generate large outsourcing leads through existing clients?

How to generate large outsourcing leads through new clients?

Why is it so important not to engage with all your opportunities?

Why is it so important to do a proper qualification of your opportunities?

How to win an outsourcing opportunity?

Can you qualify opportunities through qualification tools?

The right team for the right opportunity.

Each phase of the engagement does have different approaches.

The contract negotiations phase.

Chapter 1

Why Do Clients Outsource?

This is a legitimate question you may ask yourself. Because asking yourself that question will gives you an idea where you have to focus for trying to see if there is an outsourcing opportunity or see if you could shape an outsourcing opportunity. Why do clients outsource? What I have encountered during my career so far is that wherever you are or in whichever country you engage, majority of the clients have the same reasons for outsourcing. That is stated from my experience, of course. That is differently viewed from a client’s perspective. Majority of the clients believe that they have all specific problems; therefore, they a need to outsource. Let me tell you that majority of their high-level problems are similar to any other problem with any other client in the market or in any other country. There will, of course, always be some different client problems, but they are not in the majority to the regular high level problems they all seem to have when starting with an outsourcing engagement. What kind of similar problems do they have?

In general, the problems often occur in the areas which are not the core business of the client. Like, for example, the IT department or HR department or some other financial departments like accounting or tax. Often these non-core business areas are just seen as typical cost centres and, therefore, not really contributing to the revenue growth of the client or core business of the client. As they are just considered as cost centres, they will only be seen as costs but not as investments areas—more as cost factors to reduce costs as much as possible so that the profit of the company can improve.

All these clients have problem in these areas mentioned above with a specific scope of services and they all have a compelling event. What does that mean? If things are not fixed before a specific time, these clients will be end up into real difficulties. If that is not the case, then there is no compelling event and, therefore, no real reason to outsource.

Another thing that you will see is that the scope of outsourcing services is related to a business case. In another words, there is a business case for the client and, therefore, they will generate savings. How the business cases are put up by clients is definitely different and questionable sometimes due to internal politics, but when they see a business case, that is a first step for outsourcing.

The other problem that you often see is that clients always have an issue with a non-core department like IT, HR or finance. Let me give you an example of problems with the IT department. At these clients, you often see that the business side of the company is not happy with their own IT department. The business side means those departments that are related to core business of the client and seen as major contributors to the strategy and revenue growth. This is because the business is continuously demanding things from the IT department due to market movements but the IT department is not able to react immediately to it. In others words, the demand side of the house is not aligned with the IT side of the house. One of the major causes is, of course, that those IT departments are not seen as core business but as cost centres. Although, in reality, these departments often do not have latest technology installed. The IT people themselves are not upgraded with the latest technology in the market because their company has never invested enough in training and improving their skillset or attracting new IT employees in the market.

Another problem which you see many clients have is when the number of their suppliers grows enormously. The ‘to-be-outsourced department’ ends up in a situation that they cannot control the suppliers because there are so many of them. They all have built up specific expertise that the client does not dare to or does not have the overall view as to how to reduce the number of external suppliers. Managing all these suppliers and, at the same time, managing the demand management attached to it from the internal organisation or business side of the organisation is a big challenge for these clients and not easy to manage. It often ends up in a situation that there is such a big tension between the business side of the client and their internal department that the business side is extremely dissatisfied and not happy with the current services provided by these departments. They often see that their department cannot really adapt easily and quickly with the demands and changes in the market