Organisations with professional procurement departments are well-prepared for complex sales conversations. These departments are often armed with large amounts of data about your organisation's performance globally and comparative competitor data. They may know more about your organisation than you do. Plus, they have a variety of smart tactics at their disposal to lock-in better deals for their organisation. All of this creates a challenging environment for salespeople to successfully penetrate - your sales team needs a new way of dealing with procurement.

Sellers without the experience of knowing what works - and what doesn't - especially in the complex sales arena may find winning the business a difficult and expensive learning curve.

So, to help companies sell into procurement, we've combined our extensive understanding of best practices in procurement with deeply researched best practices in sales and account management, developing an approach to dealing with the procurement that has been shown to deliver real sales improvements.

• An appreciation of the ‘new realities’ of buying and selling and how senior-level sales leaders can recalibrate their own thinking and approach.
• Identification of which type of professional procurement organization account managers are dealing with and the most effective strategies for successful engagement.
• Comprehensive understanding and application of the power levers in the relationship and their impact on selling success. The ability for senior-level sales leaders to take control of the power dynamic.
• Understanding the core procurement category management process, with each stage’s sub-steps, tools, practices, and behaviors all comprehensively explained.
• Account and Negotiation planning and execution approaches that specifically address the interests of all constituents in the customer business; professional buyers and their colleague stakeholders.
• ‘Holding up the mirror’ to senior-level sales leaders and determining how credible they are in the eyes of the professional buyer. In other words, the ‘blueprint’ for the ideal senior level sales leaders.
• The senior-level sales leaders become knowledgeable of procurement’s ‘power plays’ and is forearmed with appropriate responses.
• Confident senior-level sales leaders, delivering better business retention and more success in winning new tenders.

A clear roadway to your next bid proposal?

• Does answering the bid fit with your business strategy?
• Do you have a bid team who can create and deliver a winning proposial?
• How long might it take the bid team to reach peak performance? How does that fit with the bid timetable?
• How are you avoiding blinkered, group-think creeping into your proposition?
• Is your solution genuinely innovative and different to other contenders?
• What are your plans for managing stakeholders and building strong relationships with the customer?
• How will you convince the customer that your proposition is the best solution for what they perceive the problem to be?
• Are you convinced that your proposition is financially attractive and financially deliverable?
• Have you stress-tested your negotiation strategy? Or even got a negotiation strategy?
• What are the strategic implications of not winning the bid - or coming second?
• What is the risk of a competitor winning the bid?

• The reliability of the sales and revenue forecasts
• The potential volatility in those forecasts
• The more likely outcomes
• The key risks that need to be managed to mitigate against failure
• Where any investment should be made to improve potential and opportunity