Solutions – Are You Selling What They’re Buying?
Is there a solution you can supply and support?• Can it be matched within your companies’ current portfolio?
So how do you to identify potential EU buyers? Let’s explore how you can ‘dig up’ areas which fit your offering, and ensure that you achieve the sale.
Here’s an interesting European figure; feral child and fratricidal founder of the first European state, he seems to command a place in our collective imagination. Step forward Romulus.
Many of us will be content to let him remain there, tucked away as another childhood memory; like most foundation myths – culturally instructive but of doubtful historicity. No problem and (therefore) no solution.
Dr. Andrea Carandini thinks differently. A septuagenarian Italian archaeologist and aristocrat, his Romulus is a historical figure and actual founder of Rome. To argue his case, Dr. Carandini (rather tenuously) attempts to match recent discoveries in Rome to a very real eponymous man; a wall here, a palace there.
Rather than being content with a latent piece of information, Dr. Carandini sees an ancient wall in Rome as a solution waiting to happen, he then impatiently searches backwards for a problem to be solved, and duly finds our friend Romulus.
Searching for Problems to Solve.
To suggest that the problem of Romulus’ historicity can be solved by a few contemporaneous finds is in my view off the mark. The truth is that Dr. Carandini’s peers don’t like his thesis because it takes a large shortcut. In winning business, we like shortcuts. We should take our cue from the rogue archaeologist.
Agonistic archaeologists aren’t the only ones who need to work backwards. While Dr. Carandini’s ideas attract scepticism because of this methodology, the idea of finding problems that your products and service can solve is the smart route to success in EU procurement. So how do we best match our solutions (products and services) to European problems (tenders)?
Working Backwards
Rather than enduring the expense of changing your product or service, finding existing problems (EU tenders) which match your existing solutions is the more economic modi operandi. To revert to the over-excavated archaeological analogy, these problems lie right under our feet, waiting for us to use the right tool to dig them up.
Digging for EU Gold
While matching your solution to a greater number of relevant problems is the first and most happy outcome of using tender experts. We will often find that, according to our business instincts, our solutions do indeed need to change according to demand.
But change how? Well, no matter how much we think we know our market, we could all know it that little bit better. Again, information on who’s buying what, when they’re doing it and where they are is under your feet – literally at your fingertips. Information of this kind is invaluable when the time to alter our products or services comes.
Romulus’ existence may never be proved either way, archaeologists will dig on, hoping that the problem can be resolved. For European procurement the future is much less bleak; in attempting to unearth our own Romuli, with our intelligent, pinpoint accuracy – keep digging and you will find EU gold.