A month or so ago, Tanya Wade posted a great article on how “A buyer is just a buyer” is BS because a buyer is NOT a buyer.

Tanya noted that while she buys marketing agency services, software, consultancy services, and logistics — stuff that companies need to operate but that customers never directly see — her friend Simon buys food — a commodity that has to arrive on time, meet quality standards, survive audits, and keep processing lines running (as shutdowns can cost millions). This is entirely different from marketing services and consultancy services as it’s rare that a week late will make a difference (and if it does, you waited way too long to contract them).

Tanya then notes that in addition to buyers who support physical supply chains, like Simon, and buyers who support stakeholder needs, like her, there is a third type of buyer — the retail merchandiser who decide what actually hits shelves. And they need entirely different skill sets.

In actuality, there are more types of buyers than that. Think of the physical supply chain — you’re buying inputs or you’re buying finished goods. For the information chain, you’re buying data subscriptions, or you’re buying the software that processes it. For the organization, you’re buying products from the physical chain, information, or services to support the business — which could be agencies/consultancies that process and present the information in different ways (media advertisements, studies, etc.) than software would process such information.

But even this does not capture the complexity of purchasing. You need to embrace Busch-Lamoureux Exact Purchasing to properly segment your buyers.

Because you don’t just care if it’s a product, service, data, or software offering — you care about how it is used and where it falls in the pocket cube. Because if the product is complex (i.e. you need precise specifications for your manufacturing process) or very high risk, you need to manage it differently than if it is not complex or low risk. In the first case, you need to spend a lot of time doing spec reviews and detailed inspections of physical samples before making any decision, and in the second scenario you need to understand all of the events that could present a significant risk of disruption, monitor for them, and have mitigation plans ready to go should an event happen that is going to impact your supply.

And to make matters worse, what’s complex or high risk at one level in the supply chain is less so at another level. If you’re manufacturing electronics, like cell phones or laptops, RAM is a highly complex category that needs to meet exact specifications, have very low failure rates, arrive on time, and fit in your product where the sizes must be within 1/10 mm or it won’t fit in your product. This requires a high degree of manufacturing expertise, spec review, and sample inspection and testing. This is very different than the needs of an IT department supporting desktops in a large development shop where all you care about is the RAM type (SDRAM, SGRAM), the capacity, and the MHz. Brand doesn’t matter — because you’re just upgrading or repairing a desktop or internal server and shoving them in a slot based on whatever is cheapest, height doesn’t matter, because you have extra centimeters, and the production technology (and how that may impact the failure rate) doesn’t matter, because you expect 1% to fail and you just replace them.

In other words, a buyer is defined not just by the category, but where it fits in the Busch-Lamoureux  Exact Purchasing framework from the viewpoint of the organization — as it defines not just how you buy, but how you mitigate, monitor, and manage.