The Point

In this week’s Flip Side coverage, I want to take you through a sales-oriented post from a blog called The Pipeline on ‘Selling to Procurement’. The Pipeline is written by Tibor Shanto, Founder and President of Renbor Sales Solutions Inc., and creator of Objective Based Selling.

“What we see depends mainly on what we look for.”
― John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834 - 1913)

This week's trip to the Flip Side is a humorous - and visual - look at the many perceptions of sales people. We came across an image last week that represents how sales people are perceived by their friends, customers, and society as a whole as well as the way they see themselves versus what their job is really like. We also had our undercover sales advisor, “The Sales Guy” interpret the reality of the situation. Visuals are a great way to communicate subtle differences, and this will allow you to laugh as well as to gain some additional insight into the complex, multi-faceted world of being a sales account rep.

Without further ado, here is the picture:

This week’s featured webinar was presented by Supply and Demand Chain Executive. The approach that was emphasized in this webinar got back to old-fashioned data quality. Having a solid dataset to work from is the first line of defense against risk – or at least against missing and mis-information.

Joining Supply & Demand Chain Exec was Jon Bovit, VP of Enterprise Solutions and Chief Marketing Officer for CVM Solutions, a provider of supplier management solutions that enable clients to achieve operational excellence, drive cost savings and mitigate supplier risk.

Last week, MyPurchasingCenter hosted a webinar called, ‘Innovating With Suppliers To Cut Costs, Support Growth, And Navigate An Uncertain Economy’. The main speaker was from Vantage Partners, a Boston-based management consulting firm specializing in negotiation skills development. We don’t usually cover events presented to a buy-side audience on The Flip Side, but this particular event shared a significant amount of supplier perspective on innovation between buyer and supplier.

You can view/listen to the event on demand on MyPurchasingCenter's site.

Thanks to the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, one of today’s largest procurement/sales challenges is easy to put into words. We talk about the need for partnerships and collaboration, but how often do we successfully take the effort beyond talk so that it includes open and productive conversation with our reps and supplier account managers?

Other than a brief introduction of each panelist at the beginning of the event moderated by ES Research, this was an entirely unrehearsed, unscripted discussion among four industry experts in the area of selling and negotiating with the corporate procurement function. Live questions were taken from the audience via telephone.  There were no slides. One of the speakers on the call described procurement and our processes as being "like trying to get a peek behind the curtain of Oz".

“Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful Oz. I said come back tomorrow.”

-- The Wizard of Oz, 1939

Last week’s featured event notes were focused on the challenges specific to the procurement of complex services. As a continuation of that, I did some reading on the differences in SELLING professional services.

One of my favorite places to go for sales white papers is Huthwaite’s resource library. If you are interested in more, you can download their whitepapers and read them yourself – no registration process required.

Yogi Berra was a famous baseball player for the New York Yankees in the 1940's and '50's. He is famous for his quotes. One that comes to mind is: "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up somewhere else" . That can certainly apply to procurement and supplier performance. If that is not measured and reviewed, how do you know if they are meeting your organization's goals?

I have been part of an organization that has utilized scorecards to measure the performance of suppliers. Both the stakeholder and the supplier are asked the same questions. We started out slowly and built it up to include more suppliers and categories. It took time and return rate of the survey is still a challenge.

“The second step to cure procurement's PR ills is to bring more big personalities and aspiring leaders into the ranks -- folks who aren't afraid to create controversy and manufacture a ruckus internally. It's precisely these types of larger-than-life personalities who previously might have gone into sales, corporate development or finance that our function needs to continuously call attention to itself and shame the business into prioritizing changes that save money. -– Jason Busch, Spend Matters: July 10, 2009

This week, our notes are on a whitepaper by solution provider Proactis. You can find more information about them in our Vendor Directory. Risk assessment and management are all the rage now, and yet it is amazing how getting a different perspective can allow new ideas to bubble to the top.

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is financial statement analysis, and hopefully you’ll believe me when I say that if I can get comfortable with this, ANYONE else can too. Financial statements are not always easy to read, but with risk management and new supplier identification on the docket, the time has come for all of us to get used to doing it.

This week’s featured event was sponsored by Supply & Demand Chain Exec: Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing. The main speaker was Kate Vitasek from the University of Tennessee’s Center for Executive Education. She is also the Founder of Supply Chain Visions – a Top 10 Boutique Consulting firm specializing in Supply Chain Management and the author of a new book, Vested Outsourcing: Five Rules that will Transform Outsourcing.

I’m planning to cover the ‘Changing Face of Procurement’ as soon as it comes out this afternoon, but this morning I’d like to briefly take you through this week’s Supply & Demand Chain Exec webinar on ‘Identifying and Managing Supply Chain Risk sponsored by Aravo. A Principal Analyst at Forrester made use of some fabulous vocabulary words as she spoke about managing risk. I’ll give you my favorite two here with definitions. I love it when people dust off truly descriptive “big words” and use them comfortably in a presentation. Professional development is not just about getting a better understanding of the subject being discussed, but also giving our minds something fresh to chew on. See if you can both words in conversation today – without getting yourself in any trouble of course.

In last Tuesday’s Flip Side coverage, I introduced a white paper that speaks to the exact premise of “The Flip Side” here at Buyers Meeting Point – that sales and procurement have a lot to learn from each other: ‘When Sales and Procurement Collide’ (click to download it). We started by looking at the comments sales professionals had about the most effective procurement organizations they had worked with.

This week our webinar notes come from Tuesday’s Sourcing Interests Group presentation of “VMO Models and Guide to Structuring” with speaker Michele Flynn, president of Enterprise Management Solutions.

Sadly, SIG’s webinar archives are only available to their members. On the other hand, EMS has posted the slides here so you can at least take a look at those.  While the commentary from a webinar always adds significant value, there are a couple of specifics slides that I will highlight in my notes below.

This week’s Wiki-Wednesday topic is benchmarking, and we are covering it at the suggestion of BMP member Victor Halchin. A discussion has been going on in the Strategic Sourcing & Procurement group on LinkedIn in response to the following question: "If you are "locked " into a supplier , would you be prepared to try another for benchmarking even if it was just to "bash " down the supplier on price - would you change suppliers if you were offered the same service at reduced costs on your purchasing requirements?”

This week’s Flip Side topic comes from a webinar and white paper put out by The Executive Conversation and the Brandon Hall Group in July 2011 “Essential Selling Competencies: The Buyers Side Perspective”. I haven’t been able to find a place on either company’s website for you to directly download the whitepaper or listen to the archive of the webinar, so let me start by giving you a quick rundown on the whitepaper itself.

This week's Wiki-Wednesday topic is the Pareto Principle - also known as the 80/20 rule. Many of us use it all of the time, but do we really understand the implications of the distribution principle? I'm sure I hadn't fully thought about it until reading up for this weeks' posting. Other things I did not know about the primciple are that it was incorrectly attributed to early 20th century economist Vilfredo Pareto because he observed that 20 percent of the landowners in Italy owned 80% of the land. (He also noted that 20% of the pea plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas...)

“The Flip Side” is a buyers meeting point resource where we take sales training and information, along with direct input form our own undercover sales advisor to bring you a better rounded perspective on your own position.

“The Flip Side” is a buyers meeting point resource where we take sales training and information, along with direct input form our own undercover sales advisor to bring you a better rounded perspective on your own position.