Last week, the doctor asked fellow niche/independent consultants as to how we can help to dispel the PROCUREMENT STINK which is permeating the space as a result of poor choices, bad information, and sometimes bad actors, which include the reasons we described in that article as well as many more.

Why? Because it’s going to take a collective effort among analysts, consultants, and vendors to dispel the stink permeating the Procurement space, and no one on his or her own will have all the solutions. As expected, some of the greats chimed in with their thoughts and ideas and these thoughts and ideas need to be given center stage, so this is what we’re going to do today!

James Meads

Clarity and transparency on your business model is key, especially if you have revenue streams from solution providers.

As Patrick Van Osta echoed in the comments, the uphill path to recovery, I feel, is for consultants to reclaim the position of sole trusted advisor, and there’s no way we’re ever going to be trusted advisors if we are not clear and transparent in our operations and goals. If we’re hiding our intentions, or upsides, how will the client know whether or not our goals actually align with theirs?

Joël Collin-Demers

I’m 100% on-board with the need for transparency and taking decisions based on what’s best for the client long term. Your job is to make yourself redundant as soon as possible!

In Procurement, there’s always another project. ALWAYS. You don’t have to milk one for life, with your help and guidance, you can open the client’s eyes as to not only how much there is to do, but how much they can do better, for a great ROI, with your help. Just like there’s well over 25,000 (or 35,000) species of fish in the sea, there are tens of thousands of unique aspects to Procurement in a modern enterprise. And just like you have to know where to fish, what hook to use, and what bait to use to catch a type of fish, you need to know the equivalents for each category, methodology, and process.

Jon W. Hansen

Practitioners stop looking at technology as the “silver bullet” solution but instead focus on doing the real and hard work while Solution providers stop selling shiny paper and “falling in love” with your own technology. … and us consultants have to help the practitioners do the work, understand what they need, and steer clear of the vendor with the shiny new tech (that doesn’t actually do anything [more than cheaper, proven tech]).

Paul Martyn

Consultancies (and their clients) need to Provide performance based compensation with uniqueness. For example, provide specialist consultants with compensation that includes equity. In short, align compensation to customer value (revenue growth and retention). Because, right now, most of the good consultants that can generate the ROI a client should expect are not incentivized to do well on point-based projects (like an Affordable RFP), but instead are incentivized to work on, and sell, long-term “solution” oriented consulting that lines the firm’s (and not the clients’) pocketbook (i.e. keep doing the fishing vs. teaching the client). As a result, most of the good consultants move out of the roles they are needed in to the roles they are incentivized to take.

Vinnie Mirchandani

The web lulled a number of procurement (and IT) folks into expecting vendor, negotiation etc intelligence for cheap, if not free. Vendors are not afraid to spend on sales and marketing. Procurement needs to adopt a similar mindset to even the game.

The best things in life may be free, but the best things in business are not. (As the Arrogant Worms pointed out over three decades ago, you get NOTHING FOR NOTHING!) And if you don’t have the right tools that enable the right processes powered by the right intelligence, you’re not going to win the game. Remember that all of the best sports teams use high-tech sports tech backed by science and data analytics to help their athletes reach peak condition. Raw talent only gets you in the game. You need the right training to win, or, at least, the right guidance and tech to enable you as you learn.

There’s a lot of STINK out there now, but if you follow this advice, you’ll go a long way to removing it. After all, you can’t solve everything with a pressure washer.

Hopefully you know by now what the doctor is talking about, but if not, as per the Sourcing Innovation article from two months ago, PROCUREMENT STINKS and we should not deny it anymore.

In a nutshell, and just is just the tip of the garbage heap:

1. Case studies are ranker than expired fish in a microwave on high.
2. Approximately 85% of companies are AI-washing everything.
3. The Gen-AI claims that it will deliver Procurement to the enterprise are FALSE.
4. Intake/Orchestration is totally useless on its own.
5. Consultancies are often more in the dark than the Procurement departments they are claiming they can help.
6. DEI is being misused to push agendas and sometimes to Do Extra-legal Initiatives,

And, as per a poll put out by THE REVELATOR, we are especially concerned with the fact that 14% of practitioners would rather trust a salesperson or a marketer than a consultant or an analyst! (Now, part of this is probably due to the lack of independence from many consultancies who continually pushed their vendor “partners” on the client whether or not the “partner” was the best solution, but still, it’s not ideal. [And, hopefully, as a result of the bloodbath, the consultants who weren’t offering value to their clients were the first to go.])

As far as the doctor is concerned, the most trusted advisors in the space should be:

1. analysts
2. independent consultants

and that’s it! No sales people, no marketers, no influencers, no made up positions. Sales people are paid to sell, not to solve problems, and marketers are paid for leads and, in some organizations, there is no correlation between “leads” and the sales funnel.

So how can those of us not at a bigger consultancy, where we would be joined at the hip to preferred partners or subsidiaries (and not recommending them results in a pink slip), dispel some of the stink and regain some trust?

The first thing the doctor wants to state is that he has even less ideas here than he does for his fellow analysts. In fact, the ideas he does have should be pretty obvious.

1. Disclose any (formal) relationships we have with vendors that are recommended.

Even if a partner is the best recommendation for the client, we must still disclose the relationship, especially if there is any additional benefit we get from the recommendation (and definitely if the benefit is financial). (In addition, we should make extra effort to demonstrate that we did thoroughly evaluate the identified alternatives and have a number of reasons for the partner recommendation that are specific to the client’s needs).

2. Create RFPs based on identified needs, not free vendor templates or analyst map outlines.

It’s critically important that we don’t take shortcuts here because vendor templates are designed to ensure that the vendor who gave the template away always comes out on top (by focussing in on the requirements that the vendor executes best) and analyst map requirements focus on a set of requirements that the analysts can use to compare vendors on the same scale, not on a set of requirements that is relevant for selecting a platform for a specific customer, or even a customer of a specific size in a specific vertical.

3. Recommend vendors based on technical fit and hard requirements, not cultural fit and soft requirements.

Just like it’s not an analyst’s job to judge cultural fit or other soft factors in their analysis (as that varies too much by company to even take a shot in the dark), it’s not our job to tell clients who is a good fit — that’s for them to decide. We’re there to tell them which companies can provide a good solution, and let them decide who they are comfortable with as they will be stuck with the vendor for 3, 5, 7 or more years (not us)!

4. Make recommendations on expected ROI for the customer, not follow-on work potential.

At bigger consultancies, where the consultant is often joined at the hip to partners (and must use/recommend their solution if it can be force-fit), they are often also pressured to making the recommendation that will lead to the most follow-on work and engagement extensions (and, preferably, long drawn-out implementations and integrations). As far as the doctor is concerned, this is one of the most egregious things you can do. Especially considering that, in Procurement, work is never done and the client will always need more advice, new technology, and more help.

If we focus on the technology that will deliver the most ROI, then we are enabling the client to generate funding for additional projects and, hopefully, make us their consultant of choice in the process by focussing on them before us. The reality is that there isn’t a Procurement organization anywhere, not even in the upper quartile of Hackett Group top performers, that has all of the resources, technology and knowledge it needs. So we should never think it’s a one-and-done situation if we do well (and, moreover, do it at a fair price-point where we deliver an ROI).

5. Don’t take on projects we’re not qualified to do.

While this might get you fired at a bigger consultancy where the motto is the traditional consulting motto of “sign now, figure it out later” (because they have enough expertise and people across enough areas to do it), we need to be better (because we don’t have expertise anywhere or a lot of people to fall back on). If we’re approached with something that’s not in our wheelhouse as a consultant, we take it to the rest of the company. If it doesn’t fit anyone’s wheelhouse, we need to politely decline the work. If it means we never get asked again, then we know that’s a client we wouldn’t want to work for as any client with working brain cells would be impressed and honoured to know a consultant who didn’t just say yes but instead thought about whether or not they could deliver enough value relative to their price tag before accepting the work.

Furthermore, if we take the time to educate the client on what our services are and where we could help, we should be the first call they make when they have the right project, and maybe even get it in a sole-source negotiation if the project doesn’t cross a mandatory public bid threshold. People worth working for value honesty, and are very likely to come back to you, either at their current company or their next company, if you are honest about what you can and can’t do and what value you can provide. (Furthermore, if you investigate the company and can identify something you could do to help them, nothing stops you from proposing that project and working with them to close that project while helping them find the right consultant for the project you can’t do.)

At the end of the day, no one ever ruined their reputation by saying no to work they weren’t suited for — they ruined their reputation by taking on work they weren’t qualified to even talk about and then f6ck1ng it up royally.

the doctor‘s not sure it’s enough, but it’s a start, and if other independent consultants make an effort to figure out how to restore our reputation, maybe we’ll find the answer, provide the value that we are engaged to provide, and get back the trust we should have.