Equipment Vendor Sales Support
Selling specialist production equipment into the battery materials industry is often a challenge, especially when the customer is unsure of what they need and unfamiliar with the vendor and what they offer. The challenges are magnified when equipment procurement takes place through a capital project and the vendor is unfamiliar with the process and dealing with intermediaries such as FEED or EPC contractors.
The lack of understanding between customer and vendor causes misalignments and miscommunications giving rise to wasted efforts, delays, frustration, and missed opportunities for both parties.
Newman Eventus have over twenty years’ experience of client-side technology procurement into capital projects and regularly work with specialist production equipment vendors in the battery materials industry. We understand the root causes of problems in the procurement process which allows us to anticipate when they occur and develop mitigation strategies. With our help you can ensure your sales process goes smoothly from initial enquiry to purchase order.
How we can help
Many small and medium sized suppliers of equipment packages find themselves devoting most of their time responding to a seemingly endless stream of enquiries, many of which have extremely short deadlines for submission. This leads to other areas of the business, such as project management and operations, being neglected.
Newman Eventus can help make your handling of enquiries and proposal preparation more efficient through a variety of proven techniques, ensuring opportunities don’t get missed while allowing key personnel to carry out their core functions with minimal distractions.
A common source of frustration for vendors is having their product accepted by their customer’s engineering team but the management remain skeptical.
This is usually because the criteria for commercial managers are different from those of engineers and crucial information is missing, the marketing vocabulary is targeted at the wrong people, and the decision-making process poorly understood.
Newman Eventus can help you deploy your technology into a client organisation by ensuring marketing materials speak to both technical staff and managers, you have the right information available at the right time, and you fully understand the decision-making process surrounding procurement.
Vendors often find themselves engaged with a customer for months – attending meetings, submitting technical information, revising proposals – but no PO ever arrives despite repeated promises that an order is imminent. This is usually caused by a lack of understanding of client-side procurement and project approval processes.
Newman Eventus can guide you through your customer engagement, asking the right questions to ensure you’re working to realistic timelines, your expectations are managed, and your time isn’t wasted.
Technology vendors often find themselves receiving requests for information which isn’t readily available, e.g. a P&ID before any engineering has been carried out, or a cost estimate without key parameters being provided. This results in confusion and frustration on both sides because the purpose of the request is not communicated properly by the customer nor understood by the vendor. In the worst case the customer gives up and goes with a competitor.
Newman Eventus can work with you to pre-empt such requests and ensure you have the right information when the customer needs it, putting you one step ahead of your competition and greatly improving your chances of winning an order.
Many customers expect vendors to submit detailed technical dossiers, prepare engineering deliverables, develop multiple different engineering options, and attend difficult technical meetings for weeks or months before placing an order. In other words, you are working for free in the hope of winning a contract which may never come. In addition, critical resources are diverted from other activities to deal with customer issues on an ad hoc basis, negatively impacting your business.
Newman Eventus can provide guidance, strategies, and customer management services to ensure you are reimbursed for engineering activities carried out in advance of a purchase order, allowing you to properly manage your resources and eliminate your financial exposure.
Most customer’s capital projects are delivered in partnership with an engineering firm, often a FEED contractor followed by an EPC company. Having enjoyed a productive relationship with the customer in the project’s early stages, vendors can find themselves suddenly having to interface with an engineering company which exhibits substantially different behaviours. This new relationship is often marred by mutually poor understanding, communication, and expectations.
Drawing on our substantial capital projects experience working alongside the world’s leading FEED and EPC contractors, Newman Eventus can assist you in managing the interfaces to ensure expectations are understood, information is submitted on time and to the right level of detail, and your commercial position and reputation are protected.
Training
Newman Eventus can help your engineering and sales teams deliver better business outcomes through a 1-day training course which will enable them to:
- Understand how they fit into a client’s overall capital project and associated procurement program.
- Understand the client’s main drivers and how they can best respond to them at each stage of the project.
- Ask pertinent questions of a client Project Engineer or Process Technology Lead to ascertain what stage the project is in, identify what information is required, and anticipate a rough order placement date.
- Engage effectively with clients, FEED contractors, and EPC companies to ensure their resources are efficiently allocated, unnecessary work eliminated, and non-reimbursable works minimised.
We have been described as a Swiss Army knife: not the first choice in some cases, but highly versatile and exactly what you need in certain situations.
