Business situation

How do you take an organisation that has world class capability; deployed and tested in the toughest military conditions and grow your commercial markets whilst protecting your defence market heritage?

This was the situation faced by Stephen Leece a year ago, when he took over as Business Development Director of the Centre of Human Sciences at QinetiQ.

The requirement

Stephen felt he needed to develop customer led propositions to take to the commercial market to meet this challenge.

"The customer's viewpoint should drive the whole process. This way you have evidence of the client need and avoid being technology driven."

Stephen and his team were working on a number of themes including clothing technologies, security in public spaces and health and wellbeing.

"Our aim was to build on these and develop a more comprehensive 'people and performance' proposition. This would allow us to move from an advisory role into deliverers of the propositions" says Stephen.

The deliverables

fresheye led the CHS Business Development team through their proven approach for constructing customer value propositions.

The first step brought together QinetiQ's Business Development team, major bid managers and senior technical contacts to understand the situation that the target market find themselves in.

Outline propositions were defined where QinetiQ were best placed to respond to one or more of the target's needs. For the 'people and performance' proposition this was seen to be where individuals are still critical to the process and where they have to interpret system outputs and make decisions.

Supporting case studies from clients as diverse as the Royal Navy and commercial airports were developed.

This enabled QinetiQ to demonstrate how the performance of people in mission critical systems has a huge impact on operational effectiveness and to bring the proposition to life with real examples.

The benefits

Stephen believes the result of working through this structured construction process with fresheyemarketing is "Delivering the detail and proof you need to fully support the proposition that the salesperson takes to the client. All the 'thought leadership' part has been done so our bid teams can bid faster with stronger propositions that meet the customers' needs".

Why fresheye

What differentiates this approach is the integration of marketing and propositions. In many organisations these tend to be separate activities, each having a separate view. By taking the customer view you straddle the divide and leverage the marketing opportunity.

Stephen added "We knew we were embedded in our own view of the world. fresheyemarketing articulate things less technically and use customer phraseology. From their experience they know the hard facts of the world. They can un-earth all the issues, ask the tough questions and cut through the three letter anachronisms (TLAs)."