Don't Act Stupidly
For those of you that follow this blog, you're probably sick of reading my rantings about how procurement pros need to step up their game and become true (and trusted) business advisors to their customers. If so, you can stop reading right abooooout NOW.
Glad to see you stuck with me! I was having a telephone conversation with my boss today about business advisors in general and I jotted down some notes from our conversation. I think what we talked about really rang true in the context of procurement pros and how we can really impact (in a positive way) the business of our customers. So, here's a nice short little memory map that you can use to help simplify the complicated process of providing business advice to your customers in procurements: ADVISE, RECOMMEND, and SUPPORT. Read on for more golden nuggets...
ADVISE
- What procurement “advice” are you really providing? Keep in mind that your “technical opinions” just sound like random nonsense to your customers and don’t directly translate into strategic business advice that they can use.
- Understand your customer’s business so you can understand the impact of your procurement advice on the customer. How does your advice impact cost, customer service, and administration / bureaucracy?
- Seek to be a “green light” person when advising your customer. Find detours, not roadblocks, for your customer's procurements.
- Less is more. Being a “font of procurement advice” in your mind likely makes you a geek to avoid in your customer's mind.
RECOMMEND
- Remember that providing advice isn’t enough (durrrr, that’s why the steps of Recommend and Support exist).
- Don’t hide the ball from your customer and just leave it up to them to figure things out. Make a recommendation and give the rationale for your recommendation. I abhor proposal evaluation matrices that don't distillate a clear recommendation.
- Just because you’re technically correct doesn’t validate your recommendation—your recommendation needs to directly (and positively) address your customer’s needs.
SUPPORT
- Once your customer makes a procurement decision, get behind it. Don’t take shots at your customer behind-the-scenes or passively resist the customer’s decision.
- You can’t divorce yourself from your customer’s decision. You need to share the risk with your customer and have some skin in the game with them. For example, if your concerned with the vendor's future performance, use tools like bonds, escrow, insurance, and SLAs to mitigate risk where possible.
- CYA e-mails or memos to the file and / or complaining about your customer’s decision to your management or others will single you out, make you look like you (not your customer) acted stupidly, and result in the loss of your credibility.
- Don’t fall into the trap of not supporting your customer’s position because you don’t agree with it or because you think your advice is better.
- Pick your battles—just because your customer didn’t use all or some of your advice in making their procurement decision doesn’t entitle you to withdraw or to withhold future advice.
- Given all of the above, if your customer is clearly going down the wrong path (e.g., immoral, illegal, or unethical), “rinse and repeat” the Advise and Recommend steps to try and influence your customer to do the right thing.
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