Traveling Onsite: Reasons (contd.): # 1

Reason 1: Winning New Accounts

Onsite travel for serving a prospect adds highest value in a person's professional profile.
A typical large outsourcing deal takes 3-9 months before it finalizes. Vendor selection is the most exhaustive task during this phase. Most organizations typically follow multi-level shortlisting process, starting from the vendor selection due-diligence, understanding vendor's capabilities, service offerings, past experience, costing, productivity, utilization, and the overall total cost of ownership. Once the probable vendors are shortlisted, the organization assign them a small project to evaluate their delivery. Such projects are called 'pilot projects'.
The vendor who shocases best performance in the pilot project wins the account. It is during these pilot projects, the vendor sends the skilled resources to the onsite location for showcasing the skills, understand requirements and more importantly build cotarie with the client organization.
Resources traveling onsite for such assignments are usually smart enough to understand the client requirements, power centers of the organization, assess the unquoted factors of the evaluation. These resources are often expected to take the spot decisions after aptly judging the situation. Vendor's chances of winning or losing the account directly depend upon these resources.

Selecting the resources for pilot project onsite visit:
Since the chances of winning the account depend upon the technical competency, delivery excellence and smartness of the onsite resource, due care must be taken in selecting the right resource for such purposes.

1. Resource's technical capabilities must exceed the project demands.
2. Besides technical skills, the soft skills play a larger role in winning the deals. Hence, the person must have great interpersonal skills.
3. Capability to judge the organization's way of working, its needs and actual requirements must exist in the person.
4. The person should be articulative enough to hide the vendor's weaknesses/ negative aspects. However, the capability to understand where to draw the line between ethical non-disclosure of vendor's weaknesses or honest confession must be made by this person. So high level of maturity is involved. (It is always prudent to take time and include opinion from vendor's senior management before giving important commitments).
5. Outsourcing decision is usually painful for the client organization's employees (due to fear of losing job). Hence, the person should be smart to obtain best utilization of client's current staff and gather all valuable details.
6. Person should be strong to handle extreme pressure, especially when the stakes are high; multiple vendors are involved and the evaluation is taking place centrally.

More to come on this...