How to Encourage Procurement Support
Five tips for winning over leadership and stakeholders and encouraging procurement support throughout the organization.
By Cindy Rittel | September 7, 2023
In our profession, CPOs dream about what might be achieved if the whole business was onboard with supporting procurement. Things like 100% spend compliance, having an increased budget for procurement initiatives, and achieving a company-wide cost-conscious culture would, in short, create the conditions needed to get things done.
Of course, it isn’t that easy. Cost leaders who want to get the business behind procurement will know that the leadership team and other stakeholders tend to fall into three camps:
- With procurement: The people who understand and see the value in working with procurement and can be counted upon to embrace procurement initiatives.
- Neutral: Stakeholders who have little knowledge of procurement or fail to see its value and relevance to what they do.
- Against procurement: Stakeholders (who’ve often had a negative experience with procurement) who regard the function as an annoyance or a blocker that hampers their efforts.
Encouraging procurement support
In net promoter theory, these three groups are known as promoters, passives, and detractors. It’s up to procurement professionals to keep promoters in the business on-side, convert passives into promoters, and try to convert detractors into passives (if not into promoters as well).
So, how can we do this? Through increased visibility, education, better communication, focusing on enablement over punishment, and showing the value beyond money.
Procurement professionals can win over leadership and stakeholders in a number of ways to encourage company-wide procurement support.
1. Increase visibility to gain procurement support
If a stakeholder has no firm opinion about procurement, it’s probably because they’re unaware of the function and its purpose. When they make a purchase such as booking a business flight, for example, there’s a risk that they’ll default to using their favorite booking site rather than going through the corporate portal. This is simply because they don’t know what the process is.
Procurement can increase its visibility by marketing itself to the company to gain support. This may involve creating brochures that answer common procurement questions (how do I book a flight?) or explaining the benefits of an upcoming change, for example.
Use a multi-platform approach to capturing the attention of your audience. Email campaigns, wall posters, posts on the company intranet, and lunch-hour information sessions, for instance, are all tactics you could utilize. Procurement is no longer a back-office function. The whole team should make an effort to get away from their desks and visit their stakeholders in every function around the building. In other words, be visible.
2. Educate others
If you were to stop a random colleague in the hall and ask them what they think procurement does, there’s a good chance they won’t have an intelligent answer. Therefore, as part of your visibility campaign, it’s important to start with the basics and provide an answer to the most common question of all: what is procurement?
Focus on outcomes rather than processes. Show people what procurement can achieve, rather than how you achieve it. No one outside of the function is interested in terms like “spend management” or “RFQs.”
Likewise, this is a golden opportunity to educate others on the common misconception that procurement is solely about cost savings. Communicate the value beyond costs, such as risk reduction, social procurement and environmental benefits. After all, it’s not just about the money!
3. Speak the language of the business
Stakeholders won’t be able to give procurement support if they can’t understand what we’re talking about. While procurement jargon has its place, it’s an immediate turn-off when talking to stakeholders who can’t understand your acronyms.
Procurement professionals should be able to speak:
- The language of procurement: This is useful for communicating within the procurement and supply management ecosystem, and comes in handy at industry conferences.
- The language of the key functions you work with: If you work with marketers or engineers, for example, you should be able to speak their language. Immerse yourself in other functions to pick up the key terms and understand their priorities and concerns.
- No matter what your role is, it’s helpful to have a basic understanding of finance terminology. This will demonstrate that you have business acumen.
- Most importantly, speak the lingua franca of your business, which will be based on enterprise-level goals, targets and values.
Through increased visibility, education, and clear communication, sourcing teams can encourage support of their function and be set up on a path to procurement success.
4. Don't be the spend police
As mentioned earlier, detractors are usually against procurement because they’ve had a negative experience with the “spend police.” They may have been working on an important initiative for months only for it to be scuttled by procurement policy.
Detractors will not only damage your efforts to demonstrate the value of procurement, they’ll also work around you or engage with you only grudgingly and at the last-possible moment.
While taking on the role of spend police can get results as you chase down mavericks one by one, it is extremely time-consuming and creates a trail of angry detractors in your wake. Instead, focus on being an enabler, and using procurement technology to make it as easy as possible for end-users to comply with procurement processes.
5. Show stakeholders what's in it for them
This is change-management 101. When trying to increase procurement support, it’s no good appealing to their sense of corporate duty or love of good policy.
First, you need to discover your key stakeholders’ priorities and find out what’s keeping them awake at night. Then, show them how procurement can help address their challenges or achieve their goals. This might involve removing costs from their bottom line, decreasing the risk of doing business, or simply making it easier to book a business flight.
It won’t be easy at times, but if procurement practitioners can be steadfast in clear, open communication with stakeholders and educating others on the value of procurement, company-wide support of the function will follow suit.
Looking to jumpstart procurement and gain support within your own organization? Download our free playbook to learn more:
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