Proxima Blog

Friday Response: Educating Marketing on Procurement

  

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Procurement education begins with relationships!

Further to Steve Hall's post, I would also add that procurement needs to take on an advisory role to get buy-in from the departmental heads - turning any sceptics into advocates (the most vocal sceptics can sometimes end up being your most vocal advocates). Getting buy-in requires you to operate alongside your stakeholder and develop processes and tools which enable them to perform better, not become a burden.

Andrew Collopy, Global Procurement Director, Downstream at British Petroleum (BP) in a recent interview with Proxima advised it’s hard work maintaining such a high level of internal management and as such a challenge that has arisen is “how much time to spend on this internal validation piece – not distracting our good procurement people away from their time in the supply base?”

In a situation where your marketing department are somewhat unaware of what procurement does and the benefits it can bring, you will need to focus heavily on educating them and, more importantly, building their trust. To do this, in addition to Steve's 4 bullet, procurement should:

• Develop guidelines which are easily understood and easily integrated with your stakeholders operations (show you are there to support not hinder)
• Develop consistent feedback loops with your stakeholders and ensure you are being seen as actively working on the relationship. Regular meetings and face-to-face time should all be done with consistency and regularity to condition your stakeholder (ensuring there are no surprises with the messages you are presenting)
• Ensure there is visibility across everything you are doing which has an impact on your stakeholder and their objectives (no surprises)
• Be proactive and take solutions/ideas to your stakeholder – don’t wait for them to come to you with something that needs to be fixed
• Achieve some early wins to build trust in the stakeholders eyes – ensuring repeat business

I think the first step to building the bridge between Marketing and Procurement is to understand their motivators, drivers and challenges. Learn their language (don’t use procurement jargon). Start small and earn trust over time.