Lucy McCormack, Technology Commercial Lead from CCS, explains how small and medium-sized enterprises can get the most out of CCS market engagement and customer intelligence to help them bid for public sector contracts
Crown Commercial Service (CCS) is the UK’s biggest public procurement organisation. We use our commercial expertise to help buyers in central government and across the public and third sectors to purchase everything from locum doctors and laptops to police cars and electricity.
Our commercial agreements are designed to help organisations of all sizes sell to the government. We understand how important it is to have a diverse range of suppliers working with the public sector.
The government has to understand the needs and concerns of small businesses. The Cabinet Office has taken steps to ensure there is regular scrutiny of and feedback on government policy on small businesses through actions such as refreshing its SME Advisory Panel. It has considered how the government can increase spending with small businesses, as well as preparing the ground for the new public procurement regime, which has a focus on removing barriers for SMEs wishing to bid for public contracts.
We found that one of the key barriers faced by SMEs was a lack of adequate resources to carry out market engagement or access customer intelligence. This can result in a limited understanding of buyers’ needs and their requirements, meaning that bids are less likely to be successful. SMEs do not have whole bid teams at their disposal. There is a financial and time cost to bidding, and as winning is not guaranteed, SMEs must carefully consider each bid.
How does knowing more about the potential market help SMEs?
We know that SMEs need to bid strategically to get the biggest return on investment, which is informed by market engagement. Through market engagement, customers give suppliers early sight of their requirements. Market engagement facilitates discussion of key points right from the start and ensures the specification can be refined as necessary.
What market research does CCS carry out and how does this benefit SMEs?
At CCS, we’re not just procurement specialists; we have a wealth of market knowledge and commercial expertise. When procuring our commercial agreements, we conduct early market engagement with customers to ensure all suppliers have a clear understanding of the requirement.
Our research helps us ensure that the business cases for new commercial agreements are robust. We begin customer market engagement before starting supplier market engagement to check we have captured customers’ priorities and that the proposed commercial agreement meets their needs. We want to understand the numbers of customers likely to use the commercial agreement so that we can share this with suppliers.
We carry out extensive supplier market engagement for agreements that gives SMEs the opportunity to ask questions and challenge assumptions, such as any perception that SMEs may not be capable of delivering contracts above a certain value. CCS market engagement has highlighted that a significant number of SMEs aren’t only interested in smaller contracts. This feedback has taught us that designing commercial agreements to include a lot for small value opportunities may not always serve to increase the number of SMEs bidding. Ensuring that SMEs are included in market engagement and are able to comment on and shape the scope is much more likely to increase the number of SMEs wanting to bid.
During supplier market engagement, CCS also consults with SMEs to find out whether they have any concerns about what is being proposed and whether they see any barriers to them being able to bid. SMEs can make suggestions about, for example, the innovation that they can offer that perhaps hadn’t been considered previously and if this can be included within the scope of the agreement.
CCS carries out extensive research into industry sectors to understand market trends that will impact customers. The research could identify a need for a new commercial agreement or how existing agreements may need to change when re-procured. The research covers political, social, economic, technological, and legislative factors.
Why we conduct market engagement with suppliers
From the market engagement we undertake with suppliers, they should be able to understand:
- The background and need for a commercial agreement.
- What public sector customers will be looking for suppliers to deliver from calling off from the commercial agreement (the scope).
- Whether and how the agreement will be divided into different lots e.g. by product or service type.
- The potential value of the commercial agreement, broken down by lot if lots are used (likely customer spend through the agreement).
- An indication of tendering timescales.
- The term of the commercial agreement.
At this point, suppliers can give feedback about whether the proposed specification is deliverable and discuss ways to ensure social value is non-discriminatory to SMEs and VCSEs. S
Suppliers will then be able to make informed decisions about which opportunities to bid for. CCS supplier market engagement sessions are detailed for each agreement in the future pipeline list on the CCS upcoming agreements page.
CCS: Find out more
To learn more about how CCS is levelling the playing field for suppliers of all sizes, download our digital brochure.
We always welcome feedback, suggestions or queries. These can be submitted to smefeedback@crowncommercial.gov.uk
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