Enhance your procurement process with sales lifecycle management for Procurement

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we're going to talk about nine procurement skills that will never lose their importance see I think it's really easy to get into this mindset that AI especially gen AI is a silver bullet it's going to solve all of our problems we don't really need to have knowledge I think the complete opposite I think that the knowledge of procurement is only going to become more important it's going to be needed more than ever and deep expertise in any of these design areas is great I actually think the complete procurement professional the digital procurement Pro of 2024 onwards needs to have all of these skills in abundance right so let's start off with skill number one and that is strategic sourcing so strategic sourcing fundamentally is about finding the the best supplier at the best total cost so total cost of ownership comes into it using the most efficient process typically a competitive procurement process to find these suppliers and I would say it's a differentiator between just purchasing so with purchasing you'll typically go out to like one one two three suppliers you'll get a bit of a quote from them and then you'll put a purchase order out with them but with strategic sourcing you're you're thinking about all of the market intelligence at the start you're really analyzing the market you're trying to find opportunity there you're thinking about your Contracting terms your positions very earlier on and you're building all of this into the the front end of the process so it's just a far more indepth approach to finding the correct supplier and even with tech in the space now is ultimately going to do a lot of this for you you need to be able to understand it you need to be able to trust that it's gone out it's gone away and it's done this for you so I'm a big fan of strategic Source in it's a really great way to reduce spend save a lot of money and well like procurement 101 cut cost or reduce cost savings and I think strategic sourcing is the probably the best way to do that skill number two is supplier relationship management SRM is often the acronym that is used here so now this is all about the effective segmentation of your suppliers so like say we have 100 suppliers which of those 100 suppliers do we ultimately care about and I would suggest that your your ratios need to be like on point here so you you're not going to actively manage any more than 10 of these these suppliers so perhaps your first job here is to segment your top 10 suppliers and that's where all of your well 80% of your attention is going to be you've then got know 20 other supplies that need some care some love some attention some relationship building perhaps some of those will move into that top 10 at some point they need some nurturing and maybe you give them about 18% and then you've got your your tail spin the more transactional suppliers and you're going to spend 1 to 2% of your time with those that's a really key part of Supply relationship management that I think a lot lot of people just kind of skip over it's like it's actually knowing where to to put your focus within your supply chain and then of course we come into like the relationship piece you know how do we treat these suppliers how do we work with them how do we collaboratively partner with them how do our contract terms reflect our our intentions because if we have a very aggressive contract that says you know it's going to penalize them it's very nitty and gritty around their their performance or the kpis and the slas aren't they're not overly achievable or they're so high that it pushes your supplier beyond what is reasonable I think these are all indicators that you're not really treating them as a partner and because you're putting all the risk onto your supplier so was also thinking about like how do we actually position ourselves with you our supp reper to create a better way of working to create a better partner model to get more Innovation perhaps we get the no fast dips for new products or new innovation or new code or new updates or we get you know I don't know like more design conversations there's so much opportunity with an SRM model and I think that's really going to be prevalent moving into 2024 as hopefully as we automate a lot of the uh the the rubbish work that procurement doesn't want to be involved in data analysis is a key skill and it's actually getting easier I'll be really open about that geni is making data analysis super straight forward I think you just need to be really good at prompting gen moving forward to pick out Trends to pick out insights or to to figure stuff out that you don't know but I would say you need to at least have a decent understanding of how you can use data to tell you stuff to inform you of what your suppliers are doing of risks and how you can package of that up and share it with people across your business I think that's a really underrated skill that every procurement professional should know and I think gen is really going to augment and strengthen your ability to do this contract management is skill number four I think this is bread and butter skill set that every procurement professional should have and you know time and time again I've worked with hundreds maybe thousands of procurement professionals over the years I would say about 10% of the people I've worked with are good at Contract management and I'm talking about pre signature and signature contract management I've done videos about contract management that you can go and check out I'll leave some links in the description or on the screen now but make sure you are skilled at Contract management going forwards in the same light really skill number five is all about risk management I can't tell you how often I speak to people and they don't understand risks or they tell me oh we've got this risk and I I I inquire about it but it's been happening for like 6 months it was known before the contract I'm like that that isn't a risk if you know about it in the first place that's an an active issue that's something that you should be dealing with already a risk is something that is yet to happen that could happen and there's plenty of ways to to mitigate risks or to prevent risks from happening uh or to get data from a a procurement Tech standpoint about what risk could emerge or what risks are actually emerging so I would say and maybe I'll caveat slightly I think we should change this to a proactive risk management it's a reactive risk management I I think most people do a bit of reactive risk management we need to change that it needs to be proactive skill number six is one that I'm confident is going to be relevant always as within Human Society but just seeing what packm is doing with negotiation is incredible I still think we need to understand the art of negotiation and that's about getting the best total cost of ownership with every single one of our suppliers when to push when to relent When to Walk Away we really need to understand all of this and for me the only way you really understand this it's not through textbooks it's not through mips or sips courses it's getting in the ring with your suppliers negotiating with them and figuring it out on the flight I I think learning from experience with negotiation is the the best method skill number seven and it's maybe uh this one maybe doesn't deserve its place in here because I'm saying these are kind of traditional skills and this one I would say now should be considered a traditional skill but we're still so far behind that's having a technical proficiency when it comes to procurement what do I mean by this it means understanding the impact that digital procurement procurement can have on your organization to use it to do procurement better than ever and I still think nowhere near enough people have this skill but it is just going to be a bread and butter skill that you absolutely have to have if you want to succeed in proc moving forwards if you don't have this and you're relying on some of these other Legacy skills traditional skill sets that are still super important I don't think you're you're going to go very far as a procurement practitioner moving forward uh as we go throughout the 2020s I I I think your career is pretty much done for to be honest so really prioritize this how' you get that that's a potentially a whole another video on that but you need to really prioritized in 2024 working with an organization that is using digital procurement uh or getting into an organization that's about to go out to Market to procure some digital procurement Tech skill number eight is change management being able to influence change positively within your business whether it's in your team business-wide at all different levels of the hierarchies that exist within a organization I I think this is such an underrated skill whenever you're trying to change something in procurement and I think procurement fundamentally has to change to s survive and remain relevant in 2024 onwards then you need to be a master of change management which is bringing everyone along at the start of the journey all the way through to the end and also understanding not just procurements needs but everyone else is in the business and how procurement can really satisfy the delivery of its services to the business so yeah change management is a huge one I don't think it's going away and I do think it will get easier if people adopt a process orchestration sort of uh approach with tech going fors and and tip number nine probably the most important one and something that I highly believe in and which is why I make videos like this is communication skills being able to communicate the needs the value the requests of procurement and people across the business at all different levels very similar to the change management piece I think these two actually Interlock in in some ways is vital and then we talk about the the medium right you know can you write well can you speak well in person can you speak well on video can can you speak well on Zoom calls on slack no you need to be effective at communicating across all of these different mediums to make well to be good at procurement in 2024 right like we've got a mixture of remote hybrid impa and rols the same with your suppliers they're all over the place they're all over the world different cultures different languages it is a cacophony of cultures of people of of people types and you need to be incredible at navigating all of this it's actually one of the reasons I love procurement and I would suggest that it's probably the highest up on your list of skills to prioritize so there they are my nine skills that I believe in more than anything that every single procurement professional should have and what we'll do real soon in the coming weeks is I'll have my list of skills for you that you need to succeed as a digital procurement Pro going forward before you go make sure you check out our Trends video this is all about our procurement trends of 2024 there's just fre Trends in this particular video we've got loow more substack there's a link to join our community in the description below but check out this video all about our Trends and I'll see you real soon my friends goodbye