Procurement: Kings or Jokers

Procurement: Kings or Jokers:

I just got off the phone with the person who heads up business development in our company—by the way, she is also the President–a position she deserves and earned with hard work. She was speaking with a procurement person from one of our potential clients. This is a firm that has a new product that is critical for their success going forward and they have important work that needs to be done associated with that product. The real client has been trying to get the project going for the past month. As is often usual, procurement is handling the paperwork. It has taken this guy two weeks to respond to phone calls and e-mails and he finally agrees to a phone call and one of the first things out of his mouth is “you guys are going to have to sharpen your pencil”. Really?

Our President gave him a good description of what his options were with regard to budget and scope and that we weren’t in the business of sharpening pencils. She is a very classy person, much classier than me. Here is my answer: who the hell died and made you king? You have no idea who we are and what we do and you tell us that we have to “sharpen our pencil” to do business with you? Here’s what I know: you have no choice in the matter. We have been selected to be a vendor by people more senior than you. You have so far been unprofessional and delayed the implementation of an important project for your firm.

The real story is much worse. By your delaying, be it due to unprofessionalism or a false sense of importance, you have moved your firm down our list of pending project starts. If we have resources, you’ll get them but if we don’t, you’re going to have to wait in line until they become available—which I hope is a long time.

We have firms that we have great relationships with. We even have great relationships with their procurement people. When they have a need, we meet it. We work weekends, we travel for long distances for long periods of time. We get up early, we stay late. The firms that use procurement people who think they are kings and try to push us around rarely end up on the list.

You see those guys aren’t kings, they are really jokers. Our job is to figure out their game and play by our rules and not theirs. When they play their games, if we do our jobs right, the only people they really hurt are other managers in their own firm. When those people find out the damage the jokers are doing, if they get their just deserve, their next stop will be the circus—-where they become clowns.