I’ve written a few columns about how we prepared Nexus for a more focused and winning future during a period of extremely hard change.
Now we were well into this journey. We had a tight management team, we had decided that we would focus on identity and securing it was our ‘why’. By combining many of our technologies, we began to see the possibility of offering a working platform to manage an identity over its lifetime, both analogue and digital.
We felt confident that this was the right way to go.
One day, we received information that one of the world’s leading vehicle manufacturers was looking for a security partner to ensure that their connected vehicles could not be hacked.
We decided to go all in and do everything in our power to win this tender.
We really did everything we could to win this tender. We were a large delegation, including myself, who went and presented ourselves and our proposed solution to a large group of decision makers at the customer. When we left the meeting, I felt that we had given our best performance and now it was make or break.
A few weeks later we received feedback from the client. They told us that we had done a good job, but that they had decided to go with another supplier.
We mourned for a while – but not for long… I gathered the team that had worked so hard on this opportunity and said that I refused to let all this work go to waste. I explained that I wanted us to see this as a great opportunity to get better. We put people in a room and then led the team around the theme of maximising the learning from this loss.
Our head of development, Magnus Malmström, worked hard to understand the winning supplier’s bid. After Magnus’ analysis, we knew exactly what features our competitor could offer and where our own offer needed to be strengthened.
We decided to start working on strengthening our offering as a matter of urgency so that we could stand our ground in the fierce global competition.
In the next column, I’ll tell you how we went about winning the next – and much bigger – enquiry that landed on our desk…