Earlier this week, Cordie was invited to speak at the UK Sales Conference of one of its global manufacturing clients. There were over 100 delegates from sales, marketing and product design, who were treated to a morning training session on negotiating with professional buyers.
During the interactive session, Cordie Director Ian Thompson (pictured) gave an overview as to how procurement professionals are trained and targeted, helping the audience to distinguish between different types of targets that their customers might have.
Other themes from the training session included:
Recognise who you are negotiating with and their drivers
Prepare your negotiation plan based on your position
Everything has value, so plan your tradeables in advance
Switch your language to introduce alternative methods of persuasion
Insert the most persuasive word into your sentences
Collaboration is the key to sustainable business relationships.
“We shudder When we have to meet with Procurement!”
This was one of the most memorable phrases of the conference, but perhaps not for the right reasons.
During one of the round table discussions and breakouts, a sales manager admitted that they find meeting with their customers’ professional buyers a daunting prospect.
Part of this may be the way procurement professionals are now trained, with buyers being put through 23 degree-level exams focusing on competitive market positioning, understanding prices, analysing costs and building a strategic plan in order to become professionally-qualified with the designatory letters MCIPS behind a buyer’s name. For these customers, it means their is far greater emphasis placed on establishing a competitively-compelling commercial deal.
However, the comment also throws up cultural challenges for the procurement profession as to how they develop their collaborative skills to build lasting and effective business relationships with key suppliers.
These are important questions for any commercial professional, irrespective of which side of the negotiation table you might be sitting.
Building sustainable commercial relationships is critical to adding value for your company and organisations of the future are focusing-in on these key skills more and more.
Get in contact today to find out more about how Cordie can help develop your commercial team with these skills. As well as several different negotiation training programmes, we also run courses on effective influencing, building buyer-supplier relationships and applying commercial skills in the workplace. Use the contact form below to get in touch - we would love to hear from you!