The Sales in Procurement

There is a tug of war going on in the Public Sector procurement community at the moment, the fine balance between skills and qualifications. There is an ongoing shortage of skilled individuals available (or indeed willing!) to help the Public Sector with their escalating financial issues. So what is it we are actually looking for?

Nearly every advert I see for a procurement person in the Public Sector is the same in its essence, asking for the same qualifications, asking for specific category experience (which can vary from buying battleships to baby wipes!) – Knowledge and Experience. But with all the knowledge and all the experience required, they are perhaps forgetting one thing - a really great procurement person is always also a salesman.

I may be speaking in a biased manner, as began my journey as a ‘procurement person’ from a job in sales, but I do believe that these skills are essential in the modern world of procurement. If you read my last article in In Procurement magazine (‘Procuring People’ in May’s issue) it will come to you as no surprise that before I delved into procurement I was, in-fact, a recruitment consultant. Just as I wanted to change career the local Council was looking for someone to lead a multi-county, procurement project on lowering consultancy spend. The job sounded amazing, but I didn’t tick all the boxes on their advert – I’d never worked in procurement before, I had no idea what an OJEU was, how the Public Contract Regulations worked or that they even existed. I had also only ever working in the Private Sector so I knew that the difference would be stark. But, in a moment of self-confidence, I applied, and to my absolute astonishment I got an interview and was then offered the contract.

In my debrief I was keen to know why they chose me. The things that I held over the other candidates, they advised, were my sales and people skills. Both the Council and I knew there were holes in my procurement knowledge, but I had clinched it on skills that I had as a salesperson.

It seems to me, reflecting on this turn of events which pushed me into the path I’m now on, that I was pretty lucky. But, the recruiters were looking for things that I’m not sure we always look for when recruiting into our profession, soft skills, sales skills, commercial and strategic awareness, and it’s these skills that make a procurement person really excellent at their job.

We all too readily send our staff on courses covering OJEU, or let them spend hours mastering Kraljic matrices and supplier positioning, but do not place enough emphasis on the skills that can take this knowledge to the next level and can in transform this person into a truly excellent member of staff. And if we were to invest in our staff in this way, developing their interpersonal skills, informing them on succession plans and routes to get there, we can hope that they in turn would invest more in us. Looking beyond this to our day to day operations we need to be upskilling our staff on interaction, sales and negotiation, they need to understand about strategy and how this can lead and change according to politics and policies. The easiest way of nurturing talent is, they say, to grow you own (a horrible horticultural expression which is being bandied about often at the moment, but it is apt.) Recruitment and retention go hand in hand with training and succession planning.

It is obviously not a cure-all, there will always be those staff that cannot grasp the people skills needed to excel in this profession. We will still always need to look for some level of experience handling similar situations and or contracts, and there’s no doubt that a procurement qualification is a fantastic, theoretical, base to understand procurement methods. But do we need it all? Sure, you need to know how to work a spreadsheet to analyse costs, how to run a tender, and understand the legal aspects of our work, but so much of this can be taught. What about those soft skills, that interaction, determination and that salesmanship which could really take someone to the next level? What could we do if we recruited someone like this? It’s an interesting thought that I would encourage you to ponder next time you’re advertising or interviewing for a position.

So, how do we fill the current senior level procurement gap? I suggest that we rethink the way in which our jobs are advertised. It’s all very well stating a position as per the job description (which I’m sure many Public Sector bosses would love to be standardized across the sector!) but people aren’t attracted to something standard, they was something special. They want to know about the strange nuances of your business and the additional skills they can gain; they want to know that they will be invested in, nurtured and treated as an essential part of a dynamic team; they want to know about the uniqueness of this position and not the standard back-of-a-book blurb that is always stated. In the end, I believe that to attract great procurement staff you need to be one thing – a salesman.