Webinar: $2.5min savings Hitachi Vantara has seen using Qorus globally

If you missed our recent fireside chat with Hitachi Vantara’s Head of Strategic Bid Management, Neill Wilkinson, and Qorus’ CEO, Ray Meiring, don’t worry! You can catch the 30-minute webinar on demand, below.

A quick intro to our guest

Neill heads up the strategic bid management practice within Hitachi Vantara—a global information technology company that provides customized solutions to ensure their customers’ successful digital transformation and the Internet of Things (IoT), as well as cloud, analytics, application, big data, and mobility solutions.

Neill has been in the company’s bid management function for over nine years, so he knows all the ins and outs of this process and what it takes to close deals. Experienced people, quality content, and the right tools all form part of success, he believes.

Discussion highlights

In the webinar, Neill shares how Hitachi Vantara organizes its bid management structure; how it functions; who normally engages with the bid team and what their requirements are; how different deal sizes are managed by the team; how Qorus has enabled significant savings; and what some of the best practices are that have helped maximize the company’s win rates.

Here are just a few bite-size highlights from the discussion:

• Early engagement and early visibility are key to maximizing win rates

  Neill shares that when it comes to a complex deal, it’s important to quickly become familiar with the buying center, its members, and their roles in order to grasp how the often-extensive decision-making process works. “The earlier we understand this process, the better our chances of influencing it in our favor,” he says.

• Organization and the willingness to ask questions are two skills that bid managers should adopt

  Sharing from his own experience, Neill talks to us about the importance of being organized, and well prepared, in a bid management career. He also encourages others following in his footsteps to not be afraid of asking questions. After all, if you don’t understand something as a bid manager, he explains, the chances are the that customer won’t either.

• Hitachi Vantara has seen a notable return on investment using Qorus globally

  Neill talks us through the business case he presented when given the opportunity to lead the new strategic bid management practice globally. It demonstrated—among other benefits—that using Qorus would enable users to find high quality, up-to-date and verified proposal ready content in seconds and minutes instead of hours.

  He then goes on to share that in the six months from their global launch of Qorus, they have achieved over $2.5m in savings, and he estimates that this saving should close to triple that before reaching the 12-month mark.

• New tech developments for global business support are in the pipeline

  Talking about future plans, Neill and Ray share a glimpse into some tech features that Hitachi Vantara and Qorus are developing together to automate the output of content in multiple languages, while only having to maintain an English repository.

  The partnership between Hitachi Vantara and Qorus has grown from strength to strength—and continues to do so. Reflecting back to the early days of implementation, Neill shares that, “Like any implementation, there can be growing pains but as partners, we work through things together. That’s how we approach the relationship.”

How Qorus enables companies like Hitachi Vantara to close more deals, faster

 Qorus enables teams to bring their best minds and content together to assemble and customize proposals up to 5X faster. They’re able to build personalized presentations in minutes versus hours, using pre-approved and branded content.

With Qorus, they’re also able to find and combine the most effective pieces of their sales and marketing assets with data-driven content recommendations. And, they’re empowered to discover who and what drives a successful proposal with built-in measurement tools for smart follow up.