Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor, the podcast where we explore how the right technology can create better business outcomes, everytime. I'm Leanne Taylor, founder of Taylor Made Sales, and I'm passionate about helping Australian businesses connect with the tech solutions that drive success. In this episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by David Collins from D2 & Associates —a boutique consultancy firm helping businesses go to market effectively and efficiently through Expressions of Interest (EOI) or Request for Quote (RFQ) to ensure their technology meets the desired business outcomes. With the ever increasing products and services suppliers, it's important to work with the right technology and partner who can support and delivery technology outcomes for your business. We'll discuss how working with an expert in 'going to market' can set you up for success and save you valuable time and money whilst ensuring you partner with the right service providers to support your business's needs. Stay tuned as we dive into how to go to market effectively. For more details contact [email protected] or visit https://www.taylormadesales.com.au/tms-services  Full Episode Transcript: Leanne Taylor: Welcome to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor, your host of 10-minute Tech Talks, where we cut straight to the heart of tech for Australian businesses. In each session, we'll spend only 10 minutes with an industry expert unpacking the latest products, services, and solutions to help your business achieve great technical outcomes. Let's get started. Leanne Taylor: Hi everyone. It's Leanne Taylor here from Taylor Made Sales and today's Tech Talk, I'm really excited to have David Collins from D2 and Associates talking about going to market. David Collins: Thanks Leanne, good to be here. Leanne Taylor: Thank you. So, who are you? What do you do? And why do customers need to know you? David Collins: I am uh someone who's worked in the uh IT outsourcing industry for, gee, 30 years. Um in a variety of roles, delivery, um sales, uh client management. And now I'm um independently looking to uh help organisations with their sourcing requirements and how to go to market and how to pick the right suppliers. Leanne Taylor: Great. So tell us a bit about D2 and Associates. So what do you guys, how do you do that? David Collins: D2 and Associates is, I could be best described I guess as a as a boutique consulting organisation. Um we're a team that have some similar history in terms of employers and experience. Um and our services range anything from uh IT strategy development for uh IT services suppliers through to helping individual organisations with their sourcing requirements as we're talking about today. Um looking at uh existing contracts that might need some help or some support uh to get them back into a good shape. Um a range of services, anything to do with IT services from either a managed services or a strategy um consulting aspect. Leanne Taylor: Excellent. So I know being on the receiving end of many years of responding to tenders, what the customer is looking for and how they articulate that and then what actually comes out in an RFP or an expression of interest document can sometimes get lost in translation or there's not enough info and there's a whole lot of backwards and forwards with questions and things like that. Can you maybe touch on how you guys can support customers in making sure that they go out to market correctly and and what does that process look like for you guys? David Collins: Sure. Okay. Um let me start with sort of breaking it down into five main areas and then I'll focus in on a couple in answer to your question. So the broad set of steps when you're taking something to market, uh and perhaps the most important is the first one, which is around being clear on the business requirements. So developing a business requirements document that gets agreement from the uh internal stakeholders uh on on all the details of what's required. Um then the next step, if uh it's not clear as to who the the set of suppliers could be that could provide the service, going out through an expression of interest process and taking maybe 10, 15 suppliers and uh and coming down to maybe a short list of about five. Um next step then is the RFP process and issuing that and uh assessing that and then and shortlisting down to two, maybe three suppliers who you take through a negotiation process. And then you get to the preferred supplier and you take that through the um the final contract development and agreement development process and sign them off and off you go. So they're the sort of the high-level steps. But coming back to your particular question, um I think probably the most important thing is to get on in in terms of getting off on the right start and making sure that the requirements are well understood and and agreed um internally importantly before it goes out to the market is the development of a clear business requirements document and a business case. Um so the business requirements document is covers a range of different components but let me sort of rattle off a list of the things I normally look for. Um first off, what's the problem? What's the business problem that's being solved? Um is it is it to do with the cost of maintaining IT skills? Is it um the current solution is a service as provided aren't reliable or the quality of service is not good? Um is it easy or not easy to do business with the with your current supplier or your current arrangement? Or has there been a change of business structure that means that um perhaps you're combining with another company, you've got too many IT people and you decide you want to go to market and get someone else to provide it. Um or a range of issues. So being clear on what that the the the business problem is that's being solved. Um and talking about the different groups or business units that will receive the services. So being clear in the document about your different areas of business, they may have different service requirements, different service level requirements. Um they may have times in the year that have are particularly critical to them, so they need enhanced levels of service. Some information on the on the size and scale and components of the environment to be managed. Um could be infrastructure devices, could be up through applications, but being very clear on that. Um who the other suppliers of services are. So there may be some internal uh suppliers of service, there may be some existing external suppliers that aren't subject to the re- to the uh new engagement that you want to put out on the market and you want them to stay. So a supplier needs to be clear on that. What are you looking for from the supplier? What are the types of services? What are the types of services you decide you want to keep in house? Level one service desk is one of the ones that many organisations decide to keep in-house so that uh the team is very clear on what the requirements of the users are, rather than giving it to an external provider. Um an idea of who the potential suppliers are, how quickly the services need to be in place, and particularly for the internal business case, what's the budget? What what sort of uh what sort of money are you prepared to spend to make the um to make the business case work? Leanne Taylor: Understood. Now, there's also, I guess two ways to go to market, isn't there? There's an expression of interest and then there's an RFP process. Can you talk about those two and why you would do one or the other or both? David Collins: Really what the whole EOI aspect is is going out to potential suppliers and say, look this is what we're looking for, can you do this and are you interested in responding to an RFP? Because what you don't want to do is issue the RFP document, the detailed document out to say 15 organisations in the marketplace and then have to wade through all those responses and make all those decisions about getting down to a short list. Leanne Taylor: So, now that an RFP or an EOI goes out um to market, talk to me about how you guys add value to customers during that process because obviously there's a lot of responses that come back and the devil's in the detail. So how do you guys, what's your process around that? David Collins: Okay. So let me quickly talk about getting the RFP out the door. Um the, we, if we've done an EOI phase, we've got the content from that, we've got the content from the business requirements work. Um we then pull that together into an RFP document and covering things like the background, the business objectives, what's in scope, what's the process, um what are the uh the guidelines for completing the document, um the commercials, the evaluation criteria, all that sort of information, and that document gets released. We typically do a uh vendor presentation, a kickoff presentation with the vendor. So we would um facilitate that, we would set that up. We'd obviously get input from uh our client in terms of what's required uh and bring and they absolutely would want them to be part of that process. Um the document then goes out to the uh to the list of prospective respondents. In that four-week period, you typically get a number of uh questions coming back, and we encourage those questions to come back. So handling that whole Q&A process, be it a a phone call, more more often it's a formal written uh question and we turn around a formal written response and keep a track of all those. And you get to the point then where the RFP comes back, and then the assessment starts and we facilitate and coordinate their assessment, their objective assessment, and subjective if they want to get in and do the scoring as well, um on on each of the responses. Leanne Taylor: So David, what does an engagement look like uh for a customer to work with with you guys? David Collins: It it varies. It it can be as simple as, 'Here's an RFP document that they've already developed and they're about to release it out to the market and they just want someone to have a a review of it for a couple of days just to make sure it's uh it's hitting the mark, it's got all the required components.' Or it could be a comprehensive involvement starting at the business requirements, going all the way through the EOI, RFP, um negotiation phases, um implementation, and then some ongoing work after that. Leanne Taylor: That's fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today. We're out of time. Um but I'm looking forward to more of these conversations with you and I know we've got some webinars planned early in the year to uh have customers jump on and actually have a Q&A session with you um and run through each of those steps in a bit more detail. So thank you so much David from D2 and Associates and I look forward to chatting with you soon. David Collins: Thanks, Leanne. Leanne Taylor: Thank you for listening to Tech Talks with Taylor. I'm Leanne Taylor and here at Taylor Made Sales, our mission is to keep you, our valued customers, up-to-date and informed about the latest technology innovations that can support and elevate your business. Stay curious, stay connected, and we'll see you next time.  

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