I came onto Marjan Package 9 late. Not fashionably late. Late as in the sales restructure had already happened, someone had been removed, and I inherited a deal that was technically finished and commercially stuck.
The technical work was done. Documentation was agreed. On paper it looked ready. In reality nothing was signed and nobody could tell me when it would be. That is the most dangerous position a supplier can be in, because it feels like progress.
We won it. £1.9M, around 190 highly engineered units, through Técnicas Reunidas for Saudi Aramco's Marjan field expansion. Here is what actually moved it, because almost none of it was the thing most manufacturers obsess over.
Let me kill the myth early. Being written into the specification is the single biggest lever you have in industrial project sales. It tilts the odds hard in your favour. It is not the whole game.
By the time I arrived the technical position was settled. If the specification alone won contracts I would have had nothing to do. Instead I had a deal with no date, no bonds, no agreed lead time and no route to signature. The spec had done its job. Everything that decides whether you actually get paid was still wide open.
That is the part nobody writes about. Plenty of manufacturers sit on the approved vendor list, sit inside the technical requirement, and still lose on commercial terms, on delivery risk, or to a competitor who made the contractor's life easier.
The specification gets you into the room. Bonds, lead time and legal decide whether you leave with a contract.
Most suppliers deal with the EPC contractor and treat the operator as somebody else's problem. That is backwards.
My first action was to push for a call with Aramco involved. Two reasons. I needed to confirm we were technically sound in their eyes, not just in the contractor's. And I needed to know when Aramco actually wanted the systems on site.
That second answer is the one that changes everything. An operator's required on site date is the hardest fact in the whole project. It is not negotiable the way a procurement deadline is. Once I had it, I was no longer asking Técnicas Reunidas for a decision. I was showing them what had to happen, and by when, for their client to be satisfied.
Nothing focuses an EPC procurement team like a date their own client gave you.
Around 190 units, customised, engineered to order. That is a long phased build. You cannot compress it and you should not pretend you can.
So I did the opposite of what a nervous salesperson does. I did not bury the lead time. I put it on the table early with Borja at Técnicas Reunidas and made it the centre of the conversation. If the units have to be on site by Aramco's date, and the build takes what it takes, then the order has to be placed by a date we can both count backwards to.
Then we phased it. Not one delivery, a sequence matched to their construction programme.
Price barely came up. There are only a handful of manufacturers on the planet who can deliver that volume to that specification. When the field is that narrow you are not in a price fight, you are in a capability and credibility fight. Most exporters price every job as though it is a bidding war. Know which fight you are actually in before you discount.
Advance payment bonds, performance bonds, the wording, the issuing bank, who carries the exposure and for how long. This is the boring part that kills more contracts than any technical objection I have ever seen.
I got the bonds and the legal side moving immediately, in parallel with the commercial close rather than after it. A contact of mine in Saudi oil and gas told me plainly that provided I got the bonds away on favourable terms, we would win it. He was right.
Most manufacturers treat bonds as an administrative step at the end. Then the finance director sees the exposure for the first time three weeks before signature, panics, and suddenly you are renegotiating a deal you had already won. Handle it early or it handles you.
I knew the Middle East from my Brannan days, so the region was not new. This one was different because I had no relationship equity inside the deal and no time to build any. I had to work the structure instead.
Get the operator's date. Work the lead time backwards from it. Clear bonds and legal in parallel, not in sequence. Close on the strength of two conversations rather than one.
None of that required eighteen months of relationship building. It required knowing which levers actually move an EPC package, and pulling them in the right order. The same shape holds in defence, in marine, in rail, in construction. Different buyers, same physics.
So if your deal has been technically approved for months and still has not signed, the problem is almost certainly not technical. Go and find the operator's date, then work backwards from it.
If you are selling engineered equipment into a project driven market and you are not sure who actually controls the timeline, that is worth an hour of straight thinking. The Market Diagnostic costs $197 and gives you a clear go or no go on a market inside five working days. Or take twenty minutes and talk it through with me directly.
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