I have been working in highly commercial and sales/marketing lead environments for thirteen years.  This has included working for both international corporates, UK plc's and SME's. I have been predominantly involved in the development negotiation of commercial relationships, providing bid management expertise and also undertaking commercial, financial and strategic reviews of clients which has necessitated working with virtual teams that are often globally dispersed.
 

From a technical financial perspective, I have worked extensively with internal and external audit companies/teams and have developed an excellent understanding of tax (direct/indirect), US GAAP, IFRS and SOX and to complement this I have developed highly advanced modelling skills.

In terms of my communication skills, I have had, especially within some of my contract/interim roles, to work with people at both operational and board level of major companies as I am often required to provide strategic oversights whilst at the same time ensuring that objectives can also be achieved at an operational level.

Most recently (Manpower, First Group and Vanco) I have been working in sales lead environments where I have been responsible for identifying the best approach to take that will provide a unique USP when presenting a bid to a client, and identifying best working practice cross-functionally, so that the organisations that I have worked with have been more readily able to support the sales effort.

This has involved from a sales perspective, working within pre-sales to qualify in/out potential prospects, undertaking strategic reviews of the client company/sector/industry to work with the sales teams to produce a unique proposition and where necessary, present and negotiate the commercial elements of a bid to the client at board level. A major element of my commercial role in these negotiations was to propose funding from major financing houses such as Syscap, which required undertaking commercial, operational, financial, technical and legal risk analysis of any project as part of assessing the viability of the proposition and the project.

I have also actively developed the new business development programmes (e.g. CSC, Vanco, First Group plc, Manpower/Elan, Alltel Inc, Ahrend BV, Fujitsu) to produce pertinent and focused solutions to a client in response to an RFP/RFI, rather than produce a generic/vanilla proposition that does not directly address the concerns or objectives of the client.

I have advocated and promoted the approach (when a sales team approaches prospective clients) of developing the perspective of a
'collaborative partnership' rather than just selling a 'product'/'solution' i.e. once we understand the client requirements, the company will then work with the decision maker to help provide the justification required internally for a project/solution to be approved.

This means that I have to researched the business segment of the customer and evaluate how the proposition adds strategic competitive
advantage to the client, from the following perspectives;
 

Furthermore, I then actively work with the sales team to understand which business metrics will be used to evaluate the proposed project
e.g. ROI, Lowest Cost of Ownership and how this will impact on metrics such as ROCE, Earnings Ratio, Dividend Cover etc.  Overall, this strategy and approach has paid dividends, both in terms of win rate and invitations to presentations at client companies.