In a previous article I told you how we at Nexus were invited to participate in a large procurement to secure the fleet of a major vehicle manufacturer. How we put together an attractive bid. How we made it to the final of that tender. How we were given the opportunity to present our proposal to a large delegation of the client’s decision makers. And how it all ended with the customer choosing another supplier.
As I said, we chose to make the best of the situation and decided to learn as much as we could from this loss so that we would be even better equipped for the next enquiry.
Some time later, another enquiry came – this time from one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers. Nexus was invited to participate in a large global tender to present its solution for preventing hacking of the connected car.
With this tender in hand, we knew we had another opportunity to test ourselves against fierce global competition. We decided to do everything in our power to win this highly strategic tender.
As part of mobilising all the good forces in the company, I also invited the company’s board to a special board meeting where our operational team, together with experienced board members, discussed our bid in detail. One of the lessons we learned from this devastating loss was that we needed to create a new business model. So we sat down with the board and discussed alternative business models, risks, margins. It was a great feeling of total mobilisation, focus and team spirit.
The Nexus key account manager (KAM) for this customer was Thorsten Gahrmann. I have never worked with a more dedicated and structured KAM. His effort to map the customer in detail was truly impressive. I walked into his office one day and saw a whole wall full of post-it notes. Torsten had mapped both formal and informal decision-makers at the potential customer.He worked methodically and in a structured way to ensure that all stakeholders on the customer side received relevant information about our attractive offer.
In parallel with Torsten’s high quality work, Nexus’ development team, led by Magnus Malmström, worked to implement all the functionality requested by the customer. We also carried out advanced performance testing where we scaled up our infrastructure to really test our system’s ability to perform under extreme load. We were delighted to find that the performance of our system exceeded our expectations.
I will never forget that Friday afternoon when I was able to contact the board members and tell them that Nexus had won this tender against fierce global competition! Winning this tender was a huge achievement for the team!
One afternoon I called the development team in for a meeting. I wanted to maximise the learning and insights from the fact that we had now produced what the customer considered to be the world’s best solution . I wanted us realise how good we were when we really put our minds to it and worked together as a real team.
This story shows the enormous power of focus and teamwork. The laser focus we had as a team on this procurement made it possible. If we had been more ‘business as usual’ we would not have had a chance to win this tender.
The picture is showing our KAM Thorsten Gahrmann.