I am a firm believer that you cannot know how to satisfy the other side if you do not understand their world, why they react or behave in a certain way, what drives them to making decisions etc. In this case I do not mean Procurement’s internal stakeholders, I mean our supply partners. In my constant quest for knowledge and understanding, I tasked myself to get under the skin of the Sales Professional, their organization, its challenges and their world. A tall order, but I think I have unearthed some nuggets I want to share with you all.
I need to investigate many angles to the theories before confirming to myself that I now know and understand the matter under investigation. So, the Gurus at whose feet I went to sit to acquire my knowledge span from Zig Ziglar, Tom Hopkins, Victor Antonio, Grant Cardone, etc, and just a couple of days ago I discovered John Smibert. This hard-hitting Australian has me looking at Sales Professionals differently. For example, he has specialists talk about different topics of Sales. One of the topics which caught my eye was the discussion on V.U.C.A. No, it is not a swear word!
V.U.C.A. is an acronym to describe the current day business paradigm: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. This is a concept created by the US Military to deal with their environment. Mr. Smibert’s guest describes how this relates to the Sales Professional. He states that V.U.C.A drives the Sales Professional to be More creative, More imaginative, create More opportunities, More innovation and bring More Value to their customers so that they can better navigate their complex world.
Let’s relate V.U.C.A. to Procurement. If Sales Professionals “sell” to buyers (I use this term as we know it’s not only trained Procurement Professionals who do the buying in organizations), and the Sales guys have to adapt their Sales methodologies to help us buyers deal with our world, should we as Procurement not look at our own customers through the Sales optic? We need to analyze our customers’ V.U.C.A and deliver More creative, More imaginative, More innovative, (More) better systems and processes and opportunities to help our customers deal with their V.U.C.A. world.
I have been in organizations where Procurement was seen as the “Business Prevention Department”. For example, it took them days to authorize or process a Requisition, confirm a contract, get back to stakeholders re decisions, etc. No wonder the stakeholders were doing deals by themselves and cut us out of the loop. I don’t blame them. Procurement is a Support Function, not another swear word, and therefore we are here to help and support our customers and not make their lives more difficult with our often-times antiquated, stifling and removed from reality processes and procedures. So, if we accept that our role is internal sales based i.e. we have to sell our stakeholders to use our goods and services, I say, let’s learn from the Sales guys and emulate their moves so that we can bring value and not hindrance and frustration to our customers.
