How Idella won a tender without writing a
single line of code
We did it!! We won the deal!!!
A bit of background
A large governmental organisation in the Netherlands is outsourcing an extra benefit around unemployment and submitted a public tender where they asked Idella to join the process. The challenge for Idella was how to expedite the roadmap in this area, the functionality was plotted for 2022. We were definitely lacking in capabilities and it made no sense to join the process. We agreed internally that if we would win the deal we would unlock the budget in 2021 to fulfil the requirement but not sooner.
I reached out to the Product Discovery team to see if we could use a Design Sprint in a sales process to get the deal based on clickable “mock-ups”, which was really the bare minimum we could do in order to get the deal. After a meeting with them, they agreed to apply for the challenge together. That is where the story started!
We ran a Design Sprint
Since the Sprint team was distributed between the Netherlands, Sweden and Romania, we decided to run a remote Design Sprint 2.0, where we gathered representatives from sales, customer success and product development, as well as facilitators from Product Discovery.
The first thing to do in any Design Sprint is to ensure clear problem solving and goal settings. What exactly are we solving and how will success be measured? We reduced the scope to the following challenge:
To win the deal we had to understand who we were up against. Some team members invested some time in research and presented the main competitors to the rest of the team. We ran an exercise to document what was good and what could be done better in our solution.
We came up with the first version of the portal
Reviewing competitors helped the team agree on the main functionality and the main user flows in the solution. Visualising the full journey for all users can be as simple as using sticky notes, however, it is very helpful to understand the scope and all important flows of the entire journey.
After the team gathered some inspiration, we had two rounds of sketching and voting, creating a storyboard matching the optimal user journey. This was used as the foundation for the prototype, seen in the image below.
Winning the deal
Of course a competitive pricing is essential in a RfP. With our proposal we convinced the government organisation that Idella was THE company which is able to deliver outstanding services.
This service is based on the expertise of our employees and a high digital standard of processing data by portals with superb user experience and product design. That all gained trust that we are capable of unburdening the governmental organization, and made them decide to select Visma Idella as the winning company.
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