Good points made by Lance.

However, if the organisation has not viewed procurement as strategic up to now, it is very unlikely to start doing so tomorrow.

So, like The Beasty Boys sang : You have to fight ...for the right ...to party. And like my previous sales director use to say " Pick the fights you can win"!

Picking the fights you can win require that you have relevant information about your targer and the skill and knowledge to use this information to build a business case for procurement.

This business case is the plan that what will win the battle for procurement.

When planning a potential sale (in this case we sold high end supply chain solutions) we followed the following steps:
1) Targeting
2) Initial calls and qualification
3) Executive sponsor development
4) Value assessment and presentation
5) Negotiate and close
6) Account expansion

Seeing that procurement has to sell themselves to the organisation (procurement's clients) it make sence to follow a proven sales strategy.

So, even though you know who the client is (or not?), the steps are valid. Over the next few weeks I will be posting how I see this process can support procurement is selling themselves to the organisation, and sharing in the reward of a job wel done.

Next week we will look at targeting and initial calls and make this applicable to building a world class procurement organisation.

a) Identifying your in-house clients
b) Identifying the key stakeholders
c) High level value assessment
d) High level value presentation


Regards

__________________
David van der Walt