Many times we have been discussing about time to market and that nowadays we must be quick to address our actual or possible customers. Due to the fact that the world’s economy is becoming day by day more complicated and full of risks, we are obliged to set up expert teams who can prepare offers in a snapshot, dealing with technical issues, economical and financial ones.

Unfortunately this is not enough! We have to fight against internal process. Too often in many companies to be fast in proposing an offer is a nightmare. It takes a lot of time to receive proper approvals and go ahead with the next steps. It takes a lot of time to coordinate people belonging to offer teams: Technicians, Legal, Sales, etc.
Too many times this nightmare is worsened by tools, not one category of tools: tools for selecting people of the offer team, tools for approvals, tools for pricing, etc. Try also to guess if those tools have the same format and interfaces to be at least user friendly: I think you already know the answer.
In addition to that, we must prepare hundreds of presentations: covering all the possible milestones of an offering process: strategy, sales approach and winning plans, offer description for approval and more.
Now the question is: how could we be so fast if we have to die in this hell of bureaucracy?

I don’t discuss on the need to follow some processes, we have to. I just would like to see a lot of smartness and above all realistic approaches.

I ‘m quite convinced that in the future big enterprises will have to fight hard with small and well specialized companies. These small companies will be strictly connected to others in such a way that they will address the customers with very small times to market, using integrated offers prepared by different suppliers in a very shot time. Last but not least, small companies will be able to change approach and structure quickly for best fitting the market needs: David vs. Goliath’s effect strikes back!
By Ercole Rovida, 08/11/2008