How sales should work with procurement

Hello from Las Vegas. Looking forward to a full day at the Gartner CSO & Sales Leader Conference.A couple weeks ago I published episode #724 of Accelerate! with my guest, Jens Henschel.It’s received a lot of attention. If you haven’t listened to it yet, today would be a good time.Jens is a partner at Fivis.io. He’s a leading procurement expert. His London-based consulting firm works with major enterprises to help them transition their procurement organizations into a more strategic role within their companies.Fivis has also been asked by clients to teach their sales organizations how to work more effectively with procurement in order to close more deals.There are lots of different points of view about how sellers should work with procurement. Some advocate that sellers should avoid procurement at all costs. Others believe you should tell your buyer to go pound sand when they insist that you have to work with their procurement team. There are lots of different opinions about this. What you do is up to you.All I can say is I’ve been in sales longer than 99.9% of you and I’ve never lost a deal due to interference from procurement. In fact, I’ve had procurement help me win deals by steering me to invisible stakeholders that were pulling strings from the sidelines.Even so, we all have our procurement stories. Have there been some procurement-induced headaches along the way? Sure! Were some of those headaches self-inflicted? You bet.However, as you’ll learn when you listen to my conversation with Jens, there is a serious movement afoot to transform procurement. And to align its incentives and KPIs to the strategic objectives of the company.Check out the episode here. It may change how you view how to work with procurement.Andy