Understanding The Way Procurement Ticks

Transcript

William Pegg:Now I've been able to speak to a bunch of you already over the last day and a bit, which is great, but for those who I haven't met yet, as Kurt pointed out, my name is William Pegg. I'm the director and founder of Synthesis Group, and what we do really is specialize in working with sales and account management teams so you can better understand the corporate buyer. If you understand them, if you know how they work and how they tick, then you're more likely to be able to lift your sales, win more accounts, retain accounts for longer, increase market share, differentiate what you do. So as Kurt pointed out, I've got a number of years' experience in procurement, 14 in fact, but that's working in and with the function across a range of different businesses, everything from FMCG to agribusiness, heavy industry, public and private practice as well. Travel is a category that I know quite well. There's a number of businesses here who used to be my suppliers, and now I'm in the consulting space. So great to see familiar faces as well. So working with that travel category as an in-house buyer for quite a number of years, quite a few moons ago now. So I guess maybe to start with, It would be fair to say, I guess, that procurement can be fairly process-focused. And in travel, no doubt you would experience the faces can change quite a lot. Just when you feel you've got to know somebody, they move. And potentially their level of experience in this category itself can be fairly light. And then it can get even worse. Sometimes they can actually be quite prickly and hard to work with. So they can sometimes be a different breed of professional when sales and account managers work with them. So does any of that sound a bit familiar? They can be challenging to work with as an audience? Yep. Yep, I hear that a lot. I hear that a lot. So what I want to do today is I want to help unpack that. I want to give you a series of practical means of being able to put this into place and help you with your top-line results. Before I get going though, I'd just like to get a feel of the room. So who is in sales? Sales in the room? A lot of people. Alright, who's in account management? Okay, so a little bit more on the sales side than the account management side. Not a problem at all. Not a problem at all. So today's objectives really, they're fairly straightforward. What I want to do is I want to lift that conversation from tactics to strategy. I want you to be able to better engage this corporate buyer. I want you to be able to decommoditize what you sell and position yourself as their trusted advisor, where they come to you for advice and direction and you're indispensable for their business. And also importantly, in doing so, build your top-line results. Is that something that would be of interest? Yep. Yeah. So how today is going to work. So this is what I'm going to present today in the next hour is normally what I would share with my clients in about a day. So it's going to be tight. But I've got about— I've got a few pieces of key information I'm going to share. And you've got handouts on your table as you can see. So I want this to be— well, given it's a moderate-sized room, I won't be taking questions from the floor, but I want this to be helpful for you. I want you to leave with a plan of attack. I want you to leave with knowledge of what you can do tomorrow. Now, I'm of the firm opinion that great ideas remain great ideas unless you can operationalize them. So if you just leave thinking, oh, well, that was an interesting chat, but how do I actually change and shift the needle in my business, then this has been a bit of a waste of time. So I encourage you to fill in that worksheet that you have in front of you as we go. Now, if we get this right, if we can actually work with procurement and change how we work with them, then really we are actually able to experience something quite remarkable. So let's be clear. In many situations, procurement is actually unwilling or unable to change. So therefore, it's up to us not to try and change them, But actually think about how we choose to work with them. So if we get this right, there's a few things that we can do. One, it's fair to say that if you work better with them, if you understand how they tick, then you can expect greater top-line results in terms of you'll be able to win more accounts, you'll be able to retain accounts for longer, and be their trusted advisor. So today's focus really is about understanding them. I'm going to show you how you can impact the individual that person in procurement that you work with day to day, but also their company. I'm going to help show you how you can differentiate what you sell in a crowded market. And our goal, we want to make them look good. Because if they're doing well, you're doing well. But to do that, we need to overcome a couple of obstacles first. As I said at the beginning, I've been in this space for a number of years now, and a lot of what I do ends up working with some reasonably senior people in business, but the same types of challenges arise. So am I allowed to be candid? And we may well have some procurement people in the room, some infiltrators, so I apologize in advance. But I'd say that one of the things that I hear a lot of Is that you become a commodity. There's no real point of difference in their perspective in terms of you to your competition. I'd say something else is that every time the category manager changes or the procurement manager changes, then you've got to justify your existence. It doesn't matter how long you've held the account for. You're preventing a tender effectively in spite of the tenure you've had with them. There's a, as we all know, there's a really heavy focus on savings and price. A rigid adherence to process, particularly in the public sector. But then also supplier relationships. They're often just not seen as a priority. That's seen as a soft sort of thing. They're not— where's the commercial opportunity attached with actually having that rapport? So I'd love to see a show of hands. Do any of those 5 points Do you see any of this in what you do? Just show of hands if some of that works, lands with you. Yep? Okay. Now, before we get to the content, I want to try and make this as tangible for you as possible so you can understand what this is going to mean commercially if we can work better with them. So on the— and this is where we start to be a little bit more interactive. So on the sheet in front of you, On the very first page, I want you to start jotting down a couple of numbers here. What I'd like you to think about is and jot down what would be the average annual value of an account that you have right now. Now you might have a spread of industry size. You might have big flagship accounts. You might target the mid-market and you may have SME. You may have all three. So pick one of those areas. What would be the average value? Average annual value of an account. Just write that number down. I encourage you to participate in this. This is where you'll get the most out of it by actively answering these questions as we go. Then after that, how many do you win a year? Do you win 10, 20, 50? How many new accounts do you win a year? Drop that number down. 10. And then under that, have a bit of a think. How long do you retain these accounts for? What's the average lifespan of an account that you would work with? Is it 1 year if you're in hotels? Is it 3 years? How long do you hold them for? So then I want you to have a bit of a think. For those new accounts that you win each year, What if you could increase that number by 10%? What would that mean in top-line sales if you could increase, if you could increase the number of new accounts won by 10%? What's that going to mean? Write that figure down. And then after that, if you could retain those new accounts, for an additional tender cycle, so 2, 3 years potentially, what's that going to mean in terms of incremental top-line sales from new accounts by retaining them for longer? So does everyone have those figures? They can be thumb sucks, that's okay. It doesn't have to be a fine art at this stage. It's trying to paint the picture of what the opportunity is. Does anyone need more time or are we good with getting those numbers? I'm good. Deathly silence. All right, well, as we go, I think most of you have done. Who's got a figure there, a dollar value figure there, of under $1 million? Does anyone have a figure between $1 and $5 million? $5 and $10 million? $10 and $20 million? $10 million. Greater than 20. Yeah. The numbers become quite considerable. That genuinely is the opportunity available to you when you understand how procurement works and how it becomes less about what you sell but how you work with them. How you help them achieve their end goal, which has a direct correlation with your sales. So we're going to go through today how you can actually bring that about. Now it's probably worth— I want to give you a few insights as to how this profession works. Now you may already be aware of some of these things, but hopefully I'll be able to share a few new ones for you. The first thing is not many people plan to be in procurement. It's not a profession that most people have a burning passion to be in. I'm a great case in point. I'm actually a biological scientist when I went to uni. So I studied a Bachelor of Science, Biodiversity and Conservation, and never practiced. And when I graduated, it was the second year of that particular intake, and I just couldn't get a job. I wasn't the head of the year in the university, and so thankfully— You were a good student. Unilever picked me up, and so I spent a number of years there and have progressed on since that. But the point is, not many people plan to be in the profession. They end up falling into it through one way, shape, or form. So there are low barriers of entry. So unlike a doctor, an accountant, a lawyer, even an ecologist, they all need a degree to practice. In procurement, you don't need that. In fact, you don't need a lot to be able to work in procurement. But what that means is there is a spread of capability. There will be some people who are really strategic, very commercially minded, very forward-thinking. And there are others who are very transactional, very tactical, very short-term in their thinking. Some of those people in fact come from the more operational parts of a business. They come out of operations, they come out of stores, and they move into quasi-buyer roles. So the point is there's a spread of capability in there. However, procurement nevertheless, it desperately wants to be appreciated. It wants to be valued by its peers. It covets this seat at the table. That's all the wrong— you don't need that, but anyhow, that's what they're after. They want a seat at the table, whatever that means. However, there's a perception that business needs to overcome with procurement. Some individuals, some professionals in executive management have a good perception of procurement and others don't. For instance, when I worked with Unilever, our chairman at the time, Jean-Luc Toullemon, a French gentleman by the name. He valued procurement and category management and supply management to such a degree that his personal targets had supply relationship management as his personal targets. Now what do you think the rest of the business had? Supply relationship management as their targets. But that's not common. That's very uncommon in fact. In fact, I've got a good friend of mine who's in institutional banking. And so he works with very high net worth individuals in the banking industry. And his candid assessment is procurement is just a vehicle for him to go and earn money for the bank. That is it. It's a means to an end. There is— when I moved to Queensland 5 years ago in order to work in the oil and gas industry, initially it was very hard to do because if I wasn't a Queenslander and I didn't have oil and gas experience, then I couldn't apparently have the knowledge to go and help out and consult to organisations in this space. So there's a real perception around what procurement can and can't deliver. Now procurement must become more corporately aligned, more agile in its approach, more relationally focused, commercially minded. That's a real opportunity for you. A real opportunity for you. But first we've got to understand them a bit better. So, imagine this is, imagine this is a corporate structure. Who's at the top? The CEO. Yeah. Executive management. Yep. Who's underneath that? Who's underneath that? I would say it's front of house. The profit-earning engine of the business. You. Yeah. Sales, marketing, perhaps operations depending on the nature of the business. Who's under that? Shared services. IT, HR, finance, procurement. Who's under that? You. Do you think that's accurate, fair, and reasonable? I think it's a reflection of what a lot of businesses think. I don't believe it's right. I don't believe it's right at all. Without our clients, we don't earn money, right? Without our suppliers, we would struggle to sell the goods and services to the market. You are critical for your customers. You are not at the bottom of the food chain, but you need to know how to work with the traditional custodian of the supply base, procurement, in order to show how you're a business partner, not a service provider. You need to change that dynamic. So I'm William Pegg. Ask this question. How do you think procurement gets treated by its peers? Have you ever stopped to think about how your contact within procurement is treated by their colleagues? Sometimes well, sometimes not so. So let's have a think about how they treat You. Do you think potentially how they treat you has a direct correlation with how they are treated? Particularly if this is true? I see it time and again. Time and again. The function isn't valued. It's seen as a necessary component of a business. We need it. But that's like saying, but it's not that important. That's like saying my right ear is not as important as my right arm. That's ridiculous. They are needed and integral to the business, but they're not very good at positioning themselves as a business partner rather than a service provider. Inevitably, how they are treated will have a direct correlation with how they treat you. So we need to change that dynamic, and how we do that— we want to help them with their role, with their deliverables, what matters most to them. We want to make them look good, as I said before. We want to take away the pain, the issues, the frustration, the things they don't have time for. Get rid of the challenge. Which means, and I want you to think about this, it's less about what you sell and it's more about how you can help them. What you sell will follow, but you've got to start with what are their problems and how can we help them through this. Yeah. So, Kurt mentioned that I published my first book at the beginning of the year, which was quite an undertaking. It took 2 and a half years to do, and I'm not ready to do another one just yet. But in doing that, I managed to interview a number of fairly significant firms, Unilever, Woolworths, some banks, Domino's, Origin Energy, CSIRO. When I interviewed Origin Energy, Bruce Behrendt, who is now retired, but he was the former finance director for that business before APLNG, their oil and gas project, was established. Procurement at the time reported directly to him. Not the CFO. The CFO reported to him as well, but procurement reported directly to the finance director. Now Bruce shared a very interesting story. He's not a procurement professional, period. So when procurement was preparing, the head of procurement was preparing to come and show this, you know, he was new to the role, what we're going to do and how we're going to change. Bruce shared a very interesting statement. He stopped the procurement manager short and said, you know what, if I measure you on savings alone, one of two things are going to happen. We're either going to get everything for free or you'll fail. Wow. And he's right. You can't keep having savings. And you're not going to get it for free. So Bruce was able to understand that savings will always be a part of how procurement works. You cannot ignore that. To try and hide your head in the sand, you'll come undone. Instead, we've got to know how to actually work more effectively with them. But what he did point out is that procurement's metric or measure of success will be the executive general managers in that business how they feel procurement's adding value to their functions. So I want to point out 5 things that executive managers typically across, in broad general terms, typically want to see out of a procurement function. Clearly commercial, right? Minimize waste, reduce costs, direct impact to profit. Minimizing waste, we're not talking about things in a bin here. We're talking about inefficiencies, duplication, excess. They want to get supplies, obviously security of supply. They want to have outstanding performance. They need that innovation. It's the heartthrob of what they do. Procurement needs to be capable, relationally focused, commercially minded individuals, and the process that they adopt, it's got to be fast. It's got to be nimble. It's got to be helping the company achieve what they need. And lastly, They need to be integrated. They need to be part of the business, not sitting in an ivory tower somewhere. So what I want you to be thinking when you look at this list, how can we help them do that? What can we do that will help our procurement contacts achieve that end objective? So it's nice to know what executive managers are after, but what does procurement want? What do they want as a profession? And again, this is broad, general terms. The first one I'd say is obviously, unsurprisingly, that. You know that, I know that, that's not going to go away. But there are some things you can do with it. Believe it or not, they need and want suppliers they can trust. They may not share that with you. They may not acknowledge that, but they really need suppliers they can trust. suppliers who are in their corner. That one. Proving their worth, gaining internal recognition, being valued by their business is a significant one. And the other one, that one. Progressing to a larger, more significant category. Now, categories that earn a company money or or have a direct contribution to earnings are always going to be more important. So in the mining industry, big yellow things that dig dirt out of the ground are important. In fast-moving consumer goods, packaging, raw food ingredients, chemical ingredients will always be important. In aged care, the facilities that the residents live in will always be more important. Travel won't. The travel spend as a proportion of other spends in business is fairly small. You know that. But yet it's a category that has a lot of emotion. It has a lot of executive interest in it, and so it has a fairly elevated position. But when it all boils down to it, a bill of materials that constitutes the price of goods and services sold, unless you're in a consulting business, And everything you do is about moving your people from point A to point B. Travel is an indirect spend. It's not a direct spend. It doesn't directly contribute to the cost of producing particular goods and services. And so it's lower down the food chain. That's okay. That's okay. Don't get worried by that. I come across too many people in travel who want to try and make travel more important than it is and it just gets knocked down. So you've got to work with the card you're dealt with in terms of the category you're in. It's important, but it's not critical. So why do I say that? Why do I share the idea of where procurement's headed and what executive managers are after? Well, there are recurring challenges. There are some similarities between what procurement wants and what the executive management team are after. They're not all the same, which in itself is a bit of a problem. But however, if we can demonstrate an awareness of these problems, when we talk to procurement, all of a sudden they see you understand. You know their business. You know where their company is headed and how you can contribute. And so I want to go one, just one step deeper on this. I want to point out common mistakes that this procurement profession make. So these aren't showstoppers. These aren't going to grind the business to a halt and the wheels fall off. But these are common frustrations that the profession run into day in, day out, that they experience but also their stakeholders experience. And I want you to be thinking, just like with the executive examples I gave and what procurement's after, what can we do to resolve these? Off-the-shelf process. So many category managers will move from one business, then they leave, they go to a new business. Different industry, maybe it's the same and they use the same way of working. It doesn't always work. Non-strategic, right? Procurement needs to be working with sales. Sales is the heartthrob of a business. You have a plan for your businesses as to where it's going for the short, mid, and long term. You inevitably will also have procurement functions. Do your procurement teams work with you to understand where are you going, where are you taking your business, and How can they groom suppliers to enable your forward plan? That conversation doesn't happen very often. Limited business engagement. They don't typically understand necessarily precisely how they can contribute to the various operational arms of a business. Effectiveness of the people. We've sort of touched on that one as well. Heavy focus on savings. We've dealt with that. Poor supplier relationships. It's seen as non-commercial, which ultimately means that the best thinking, innovation, new technologies don't come their way. That idea of being a customer of choice doesn't— they haven't stopped to think about that. How can we be the preferential point of sale for our key supplier partners? Why would they want to sell to us first before our competition? And lastly, limited future-proofing. They don't think about, well, what happens if our business runs into some significant turbulent times, how can we work with our suppliers to resolve those issues? Or importantly, how do we actually manage our suppliers effectively? What's a great management program to encourage the best out of our suppliers? So again, if you want to work better with procurement, if you want to decommoditize what you do, because they see travel as all fairly vanilla in some respects, It's less about what you sell and it's more about how you can help and enable. If you understand those layers of problems and challenges and elegantly show how you can actually resolve them, then all of a sudden you shift their perspective of you, which then leads into this next one: drivers and motivators. So it's all very well understanding what their problems and challenges are, but why do they act the way they do? Right? We need to understand that. We need to understand procurement's hopes, their aspirations, their hidden fears. And it's multi-layered. So if we try and pitch a solution at what the company wants but can't show any depth to those drivers, then it will fall short. So there are actually 5 different drivers that I work with with my clients, but today we're going to talk about 2. What are the drivers? We're going to talk about the company and we're going to talk about the individual. So in other words, the company. Where is the company headed and what is it hoping to achieve in the short and the midterm? So for instance, Unilever is a business I mentioned before. They are looking for fairly aggressive growth. What matters to them is supplier performance. 98.5% and hire DIFOTQ, delivered in full on time with quality. That's what they're wanting to achieve because their customers have very high expectations on them. Domino's, okay, they do pizzas. They are also about the first in technology. They trialled Google Glass at their head office in Hamilton up in Queensland. They have drones in New Zealand delivering pizza. They have motorized bikes. They are about the firsts in technology. Telstra. Telstra is a business, and I spoke with them for my book as well, so again, nothing out of school here. Their top 10 suppliers constitute 45% of their spend, which is about $10.5 billion. Again, publicly available information. So they have a strategic partner program, how they work with Google and Apple and IBM to co-create, co-brand, and innovate because in that industry it's moved so fast if you aren't doing something new you'll be left behind. So what's the business driver? What are they— what is your customer? What are your clients? What are they wanting to achieve at a company level? And then individually, the individual you work with day in, day out, whoever that may be— procurement, is it the category manager, procurement manager, CPO, CFO— what are they wanting to achieve personally? What matters to them as human beings, but also what matters to them professionally and how will they individually make a contribution to where the company is headed. So, but we need to dig into this. So I had a client that I was working with in the automotive services space and they came to me and they said, well, our problem is we've got too many suppliers. We've been growing through aggressive acquisition. We've gone from 2,500 to 3,000 3,500 suppliers. That was the problem. The symptom of that is that their suppliers became unmanaged and they're paying more than they need. The root of that is because it's unmanaged, there's a direct impact on profitability. But they started with, we've got too many suppliers. So if you can pull back the layers, what's procurement really saying? They present a problem to you, but is it the real problem? Ask another question. But why? But why? Explain that to me a bit further. And if you can show how you understand their problems, their challenges, where their company is headed, what they individually are hoping to achieve, and you can bring that together in your solution, wouldn't that be different? To just— and I'm being flippant— seat on a plane, bed in a hotel, transaction booking someone from point A to B. I don't mean to be disrespectful with that, but wouldn't that be different if we could actually help them overcome these issues? So how do you help? This is the first question I want you to work on now. So also on the first page of your handout, this is where we're going to start putting what we've just discussed into place. So we need to understand the problems and drivers of our audience. Okay, every audience is different. If we don't bespoke and demonstrate a deeper understanding, we're going to fall short. It also ensures that we're focusing on what matters to them, not what we think are important, but it also shows you've listened. There's nothing more frustrating Sorry, when I was in the chair, to have suppliers come to you and just not listening. This demonstrates you do. So it's very important because suppliers, you've got to understand, often I think sales and account managers forget the fact that procurement deals with suppliers every day. They work with you every day, your competitors every day. They're dealing with savings every day, tenders every day. Every day, which makes them very good at it, but also a little bit robotic. Alright, so we have to show that we're a bit different. How do you stand out in that crowded market? So they have a low tolerance for general, untargeted, loose solutions. You must be tighter. You must be able to address what we're discussing here. So that question talking about thinking of a client that you may actually be challenging to work with. You've all got them. We've all got them. I've got them. Think of a client that is challenging to work with and think about your best estimates of what you think their top 3 problems and drivers are. And also explain why these are a focus for them. And what we're saying here, when doing this, it's very easy to think, oh yeah, the problems are X, Y, Z. But ask yourself these questions: What frustrates these audiences? What makes them want to pull their hair out? And go, oh, this is just killing me. Or I just want to get rid of this. It's a headache. I don't have time. This is a I just need this off my plate. Or alternatively, I just love what's being provided. Can I have ten more of this, please? So think about this client that's challenging to work with. Write down what you believe their top three problems and their top three drivers are because these will. Reframe how you work with them. And after this, we're going to go into some tactics and actually some strategies on how you can do this. Alright? So I'm going to walk around. You've got 5 minutes for this. So we'll move on. I see that some people are still writing. But again, remember, if we understand what are the problems and the challenges, then we can bring that into how we actually work with them. So by all means, keep writing while I'm talking. Just in the interest of time, I don't want to keep you any longer than than they are. So let me just tell you 3 very quick stories to try and illustrate this point. So I once had a chemical supplier who would be very aggressive in terms of the pricing that they'd offer, and they consistently would just change the pricing willy-nilly irrespective of the contract we had. So what I did is groom up 2 alternate tier 2 suppliers and gave half the business to them. I once had a a hotel, a hotel chain who I was working with, and they were very collaborative. And they knew that our travelers would book late in a particular location, and they would open up the full level of inventory except from the highest suite, and they would hold inventory back, a number of rooms back every night, knowing our travelers would always book late. They retained the account 4 years on the trot. I had another supplier who was in the packaging space who we went to market, did a tender, and they came in with about the second or third best pricing, but they offered a bit of kit, a bit of machinery that we really needed. They won the offer. They won the tender. Why do you think I tell you those 3 quick stories? A lot of procurement decisions Are driven by you, how you choose to act, the stance you choose to take, what you choose to put forward. You can influence the outcome purely by the approach you choose to take. So the second area I want to touch on now is how we can actually become a trusted advisor. Okay. So you have more influence on your clients than you actually appreciate and know, and we need to lift that conversation from tactics to strategy. So I want to give you 3 practical means or strategies that you can use that are going to be very helpful for procurement to actually help them do their job, but also it's going to shift their perspective on how they view you. They're practical, they're repeatable, and the whole team can consistently apply them. So what are they? So the first one I would suggest that all categories, significant categories, travel being one, is a forward plan. So what is this? In short, it's how procurement can plan the— how it can mature a category over time, over a 1, 2, 3-year horizon. But importantly, It's how that category, as it matures and grows and changes, can make a direct contribution to where the company is headed. If procurement operates in splendid isolation and does a tender and generates a savings figure and great, but that's actually disabling where the company is headed, then they're not going to get any thanks for that. So they need to be thinking longer term. And so this is where in this type of activity they're going to be looking at how they can reduce duplication, waste, leakage, consolidate supply suppliers, this, that, and the other. So I'll give you an example. When I ran the travel category in a former business, when I inherited the category, it was highly fragmented. We had more than 300 hotels. We had one airline contract. We had a TMC that was grossly underutilized. We had a travel policy that was appalling. We had travelers leaking all over the place, no control of safety, no idea where they were. It was an absolute dog's breakfast. But over a 2 and 3 year horizon, there was a structured plan of improvement to generate a savings figure because we needed to do that, reduce risk, increase compliance and adoption, find what the business values most. We consolidated hotels down from 300 to 30, put in place a number of fairly strategic airline agreements that were enabling the growth plan of our business. This business was buying offshore companies. So how do we have the right airline partners to enable that activity? So what this did for procurement, having a category strategy like this, it makes, as I said, a direct contribution to where the company is headed and how this isn't spend just working in isolation. It's spend that's changing and growing as the company does, helping it achieve what it needs to. The internal credibility and value for procurement by putting in place such a strategy is massive. It's a vitamin B shot in the arm. All of a sudden they're now actually making a direct contribution to where the company is headed. They are— it resolves legacy issues. They are valued and they're brought in to contribute to conversation that otherwise they'd be left out in the cold. The benefit to you, however, is that if you draft this plan plan for them, you write yourself into it. That's called longer account retention. You then also move from just being a service provider to now being an advisor. You actually provide them a blueprint of how they can mature the category. You're the experts in what you do, not procurement, contrary to what they may believe. There are some people who only work on travel as a category, less here. There's more overseas, but in Australia, category— travel is just one category of many for the vast majority of procurement managers. So for you, there's a real opportunity to actually have greater sales and longer account retention. So I want to ask, how many of you in the room know that your clients have a category forward plan for travel? Hands up if you know your clients have one. Yes. Okay, a couple of you. Do you know if you're in it? That's a huge risk in my eyes. You don't know whether you're going to be around next year. Contracts can be terminated awfully easily. So if they've got one and you don't know if you're in it or if you're not contributing to its improvement, that's an opportunity. That's a real opportunity for for you. And if your clients don't have them— so either people are bashful and not wanting to put their hands up, or your clients generally don't have one, or you don't know about it— what if you drafted it for them? What if you gave them the blueprint? And it's a draft, granted, they're going to want to change it, that's okay. But what if you put that forward? Again, now you're becoming a trusted advisor. It's less about what you sell and more about how you can help. The second area I want to touch on, category induction packs. What do I mean by that? Well, you may have had an account for 5 years and all's going swimmingly well, and then that category manager decides to move and the new person comes into the chair, and maybe they're not experienced in travel or maybe they are, and what do they want to do? Put their fingerprints on the category. So all of a sudden, in spite of your tenure, And the value you've brought, you're now fighting for the life of that account. Is that fair? No. No, it shouldn't be the case. So instead what we want to do, we want to hose down that risk. We want to completely get rid of that issue. The best way of doing that is through an induction pack. Now what does that mean? It means if you've been selected as the preferred supplier, what's the intent? Why were you chosen? Rarely will it be just savings alone, because we all know you can get something cheap, but you get what you pay for. So what's the other reasons? Why were you selected? But then importantly be thinking, okay, in this induction pack, what initiatives have we done in the past? What are we working on right now? What have we got planned for the future? And what have we put forward but they've pushed back on? So for each of those 4 categories, what are the individual initiatives and projects you've been contributing to? How have they brought a dollar value injection into your client? What has the result been? So imagine if that new person comes into the chair and all of a sudden you can say, hey, over the last 5 years, this is what we've been doing. We're a business partner of yours. And in fact, your predecessor, we put forward a number of initiatives and they weren't tabled and we went through the motions and worked out precisely what that would mean to you, here's a plan of attack as to how you could get these up. You hose down the risk of a tender because once they go to market, it's yours to lose. So an induction pack is a very effective way of being able to deal with the issue of the continual changing faces in procurement. And in this category, it happens a lot. So I had a client, for instance, who went through these exact same issue. Category manager changes. They gave the new individual the induction pack because they were asking all the questions leading towards a tender. So again, precisely as I've explained it. What this did, they ended up showing a number of initiatives that they'd put forward that had been knocked back. It hosed down the tender. They didn't go to market. But the interesting thing is they then renewed the contracts for another term. And they were able to get a 10% increase. the technology that they— this supplier wanted to bring in was then adopted. So they actually not just had a longer account, they lifted their sales. Completely reversed the risk that they had by having one of these. Another strategy, sponsorship and communication plan. So in procurement land, it'll either be mandated or non-mandated. So by that, What I mean is this: mandated procurement is where they can tell their business, you must do this and you need to comply, and the business complies. That's that Unilever example I gave you. If the chairman has the target, everyone has the target, right? Non-mandated is everything else, and that's every other business I've worked in, and it's the vast majority of clients that you will be working In other words, for procurement to get a change initiative across the line, they need to sell it. They are actually in the business of sales. They are your cousins, the opposite side of the coin. They buy it, you sell. You're better at it than them. You do it day in, day out. So what would it mean if you could create a plan of attack for how they could win support and craft the message for them to increase the likelihood of adoption of this strategy. So when I used to work in heavy industry, my CPO, who— no names, but I'm sure many of you know who this individual was— but we would sit down for travel and we would deliberately go through who do we need to target, in what order, when, What do we need to say? What words should we use? What should we avoid saying? And how do we recraft the message for the audience? So the same project, but how do we tweak it for finance? How do we tweak it for operations? How do we tweak it for the board? This is your bread and butter. You do this every day. Procurement does doesn't. They also need sponsors because in a non-mandated environment they need support from executive managers. Because of the category you find yourselves in, you work with these people. They are inevitably a secondary stakeholder of yours. The CFO, the frequent traveler, you work with these people. What if you could help procurement garner greater support internally? What if you created the plan of attack as to how to share the message of change. Again, it's not about what you sell, it's how you help. They want a savings figure, they want credibility, they want internal adoption. You can help them do that. They achieve that, you get more sales. It's win-win. So we want to take away their problem, we want to present the solution On a silver platter. Make it easy for them. Make it easy for them. And then also secure that higher internal adoption. So we've got another question that we're going to go through on the back of that sheet that you've got there. So I want you to be thinking about where is my client, where are they headed, what is procurement struggling with. So we've touched on their problems. What are their problems? Their drivers, their motivators, their challenges, and what tactics and strategies can I bring above and beyond the standard services that I would be providing to them? So it's not saying we've got a technology option that we want to sell them and it's different to what we're providing right now, we want to sell that. If that's answering the problems that we've touched on, fine. But we're talking about what are they struggling with, how can we resolve it. So this question, thinking of a client or a prospect, because it doesn't have to be necessarily a client, is wanting to improve their travel category, and in addition to existing services, flesh out 2 strategies that you can provide to them so they can get better results. It's all about them, remember, how they can get better results, but in doing so, you decommoditize what you do because your competitors do. don't know what you're doing, and you can change their perception of you. So I've given you 3. In the sales space, another angle is actually to better understand procurement's negotiation strategy. They have quite a deliberate strategy in how they deal with sales. What if you knew what that was and could re-engineer it? What if you had, for instance, a proposal readiness plan where you knew exactly what procurement looks for leading up to a proposal? so you can put the best foot forward first time? How do you differentiate? So I'd like you to have a bit of a think about, having me shared what I've shared, what are 2 things you could do above and beyond what you're already doing that directly impact the problems, the drivers, the motivators, the challenges that your clients or prospects are facing right now? And again, I'll walk around, give you a few minutes. Alright, we'll press on. So what I've shared, has this been helpful? Yeah? Has it got you thinking a little bit differently about how you can work with your corporate buyer? Yep? Excellent. So I'd love to just hear some shoutouts from the floor. What's been most helpful about what we've discussed? Understanding what makes them tick. Excellent. What makes them tick, yes. True. Anything specific? We're all on shy. You're salespeople. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. Anyhow, that's okay. So turn back the page back over. What was that earnings figure that you had at the front? Do you think that if you took a slightly different approach with how you work with the corporate buyer, that figure's achievable? Yes. Yes. I'm hearing yeses. Excellent. Absolutely it is. I do this all the time and it generates the number. So the options are we do nothing. That's an option. Do nothing. But I can guarantee you'll expect more of the same. Right? I don't suggest that's the option you take. Or we start to actually apply some of this practically into our business. We develop a structured approach to better engage the buyer so you see greater top-line results. But look, today really has been a bit of a work in progress. You don't just leave here expecting that, oh, hang on, things are going to change. You've got to now have a disciplined approach to actually changing what you do. Today is really just the beginning. Now, if indeed you found this helpful, Then what I do with a number of clients is actually walk them through this particular program, and it's built just for you. It's for sales and account managers, and the whole idea is to help you earn more. It's to help you understand procurement far more intimately. This day, as I said at the beginning, this is one hour of a broader framing day, and then we have digital tools that actually operationalize all this know-how because inevitably. I've been to so many different training events, as I'm sure you have too. 2 weeks after this event, you'll struggle to remember 20% of what I've shared unless you've got a plan. What this is designed to do is take the know-how and give you a means of consistently applying it across your entire team. These strategies, for instance, we've touched on, they are a part of that. What's next? Well, the first thing I'd suggest is that what we've discussed today needs to be shared. Apply these. I just implore you, apply these offline in your business, in your interactions. However, if you want to find out more about Knowing the Buyer, on your table is just a form. If you put in your details, one of my team will be in contact with you over the next week or 2 and we can have a conversation about this Knowing the Buyer program and how that would be helpful for your business. But I also, I have a booth out the front very near the CAPA stand, and I'm going to be around for lunch and a little bit after. So if you want to have a conversation about anything that's been discussed and how to actually bring this to life in your business, then delighted to do so. Well, I hope it's been helpful, and as I said, I'll be around. So thank you for having me. Much appreciated. Thank you, William.

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