The Point

You are creating a supplier scorecard. Where do you get the data from and what questions do you ask?

How is your vision? Is it 20-20 or do you need lenses or a magnifying glass? How about your supplier and spend visibility?

“Reverse auctions are loved by corporate purchasing managers, loathed by suppliers, and rarely discussed publicly by anyone involved.”

– Max Chafkin, Inc. Magazine

This week’s trip to The Flip Side is based on a post written by Reed Holden on his blog Pricing With Confidence: ‘Procurement: Kings or Jokers’. Holden has written a number of books on pricing and negotiation. His primary focus is helping Fortune 1000 B2B companies in a number of industries maximize their growth through setting optimal go-to-market strategies.

This week’s featured webinar was hosted by Emptoris and Procurement Leaders, with a supplier lifecycle management (SLM) case study from The ABB Group. You can view an on demand version of the event by clicking here. ABB is a global leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve their performance while lowering environmental impact. In 2010 they had $32B in revenue. As a 120 year old organization, they were decentralized with five divisions.

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.