Sell The Sizzle AND The Steak

Here in this small but critical Procurement department, we are in the midst of a revolution. New leadership from the top down has spent the past year identifying and repairing a very damaged procurement department.

I’ve come into this team in the midst of the big ship changing course. Progress is slow but it’s happening.

The management team got together late last week to do a self-assessment. What are our wins, where have we made in-roads and where are we still falling down.

One really sore topic came up for discussion. The topic is a sore spot because after a lot of work and progress, our buyers just can’t seem to step up to the plate on a particular topic.

That topic is: Price and Cost justification

This frustrates all of the leadership (and me especially). Negotiating the best pricing and then being able to show the business that the price we paid is a good use of budget is the very heart and soul of what Procurement is chartered to do.

In many cases, after reviewing a file and finding a particularly weak justification, if I interview the buyer, I find that they really do have a decent justification. They just did a cruddy job of writing it up.

These folks need to SELL IT. In marketing they have a phrase “sell the sizzle and not the steak” which refers to putting an awesome sales spin on a product that may be less than awesome.

The Procurement team needs to sell both the sizzle AND the steak. We need to have a genuine lock tight business justification that our pricing is the best we can get and very market competitive, but we also need to be able to write it up so anyone who reads it says “well yeah, that totally makes sense.”

This is a big step in taking this organization from a mediocre (to poor) Procurement team to one that the entire company from CEO on down sees as a value add.

We have much work to do.

Image from ActSeed.com