(10/10/2011) BMP's Event Picks of the Week

You can view all upcoming events on our site in a weekly listing or on an ongoing basis in our monthly calendar.

We visit over forty sources to come up with the listing so you can check one central place to see who is hosting webinars, conferences, and more.  We don’t help run the events or have any affiliation with the hosts. We see this as a valuable service we can offer to you. One other helpful thing to mention is that if you come to our calendar and click on an event that you are interested in attending, we’ve posted all of the registration links so you can sign up for the event directly from our site.

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October 10-14

This week there are five webinars, one conference, one seminar and two "Flip Side" events – I’ll explain more about the Flip Side in a minute. First let me share my procurement webinar recommendations for the week.

Both events I am recommending are on Wednesday. In the morning, Procurement Leaders is running an event called “Procurement at the Helm: Steering for Success”. The presentation is based on a survey of procurement executives about the challenges they face and how they expect to overcome them. Some of the other hot topics that will be included are sustainability, team organization, collaboration with other functions and suppliers, and other key global trends affecting procurement.

Wednesday afternoon (for the East Coast at least) is an ISM event called "Strategic Sourcing - Quick Wins to Boost This Year’s Savings Total". In late August, CPO Agenda had an event with the same title that included one of the same speakers – someone from CapGemini. That event was absolutely fantastic. I’m curious to see how similar this event is since there are less than 60 business days left in 2011 – even less depending on what kind of time you lose for holidays.

Now to the Flip Side. The Flip Side is a resource where we take sales training and methodology and ‘flip’ it to help bolster procurement skill sets. I always find it interesting to attend sales webinars – it is a quick way to achieve objectivity if you are facing challenges with supplier management or negotiations.

The two events are both on Thursday.

The first is by the TAS group, a sales training organization, and I think it has a wide appeal based on the speaker, author Seth Godin. "Seth Godin on How to Sell Smarter and Manage Better" As the TAS group says in their event description, “Seth Godin, bestselling author of 13 books, will challenge you to think along the edges of the box (because outside the box, not much gets done) as he brings his legendary point of view to the notion of selling smarter and managing better. He'll also be talking about why We Are All Weird (his latest book) and what to do about it.” I took a look at the book on Amazon, and it’s not a sales book at all. Here are a couple of lines from the description: “People with more choices, more interests and the power to do something about it are stepping forward and insisting that the world work in a different way. By enabling choice we allow people to survive and thrive.” If that doesn’t capture your imagination, let me just tell you this: the cover of the book is a guy dressed like what I think is a gnome. Who doesn’t love gnomes? I am very much looking forward to this event.

The second event is being run by the Aberdeen Group and is very sales specific. "Sales Performance 2011 & Beyond: Uncovering How The Best-in-Class Sustain, Reinforce And Leverage Selling Best Practices" The line in the description that caught my attention is this one: Successful approaches around leveraging formal selling methodology to create more meaningful dialogue with buyers. That line gives me two reasons to believe procurement will benefit from this event. The first is that we all need to strive for meaningful dialogue – simply because better communication leads to the collaboration we desperately need. Secondly, it is important to be able to recognize the methodology your sales rep is using in order to know how to either work with or negotiate with it. This is no different than needing to recognize the personality or style of the supplier you are negotiating with.

Two other quick plugs:

• If you are in Philly on Wednesday, BravoSolution and Ardent Partners are putting on an evening event called Becoming a Chief Procurement Officer. If you make it, drop us a line and let us know how it was.
• If you want to read more but just can’t find the time, over the next 6 months the PI Window on Business will be taking 15 minutes a week to cover a chapter from the soon to be released "Managing Indirect Spend: Enhancing Profitability Through Strategic Sourcing" by Source One’s Joe Payne and William Dorn.