We’ve been selling to the business stakeholders and now hear the dreaded sentence…."I need to get procurement involved.” For most of us, this is viewed as a sales death sentence! IT IS NOT!

For years we’ve been taught to sell around procurement at all costs and focus on the business stakeholders. While this may be sound advice, the reality is that procurement involvement is on the rise and most likely here to stay. We believe it’s time to start focusing on professional buyers as legitimate stakeholders, not to be avoided but to understand their needs just as we would any other buying influence.

What we’ve seen however, is that we’ve been avoiding them so long that we don’t really understand their strategic focus. We allow conversations with them to be focused only on price. We’ve spent years not only consulting to sellers, but buyers as well. We’ve leveraged this experience in our latest article: Speaking the Language of Procurement. View it below.