Once upon a time the company I worked for had a client, a private company that we provided business services. Lets say we provided 5 different services for this

Once upon a time the company I worked for had a client, a private company that we provided business services. Lets say we provided 5 different services for this client and had been doing so for several years and our client was quite satisfied with our services. The client was acquired by a PE firm and one of the first things that the acquiring PE firm did was to get all their vendors to bid in a realtime reverse auction. It was a standard process that the PE firm executed on all their portfolio companies post-acq. Of the 5 services that we provided to the client, there was one service that was very demanding. Suffice to say, it took us several years to get it off the ground and stabilize it. All that knowledge and experience made us a valuable extension of the client. We both had the battle scars. This service was only 10% of the total billing from this client, but very high maintenance, highly visible and operationally very challenging. When it came to the reverse auction, we dropped our price on this service marginally and held our price on all other services. A feature of the realtime reverse auction was that we would know our rank amongst competitive bidders on where our bid stood. So, it was nerve-wracking to know that we are not the L1 bid. We retained all our services at the pre-bid volume levels at the conclusion of the reverse auction and continued to grow this client account for another 5+ years. While this is a single anecdote and may not apply in all scenarios, complex bids don't always come down to price.