How to buy as a corporate

One of my colleagues came back from a meeting with a prospect with a grin spread across his face, when asked why he said "these guys actually know how to buy something". As a result of the meeting the project sponsor had turned to our hero and said "it is obvious now that the next step is we need to buy this software and we will arrange the purchase order straightaway".

This may seem like the bleeding obvious - but in my opinion many people don't actually know how to buy - they know how to get their groceries, pick a new fridge, update their big-boys-toys etc - but not how to buy in a corporate setting.

There are extensive training courses and sales techniques and philosophies in existence and I "tip my lid" to all of them however for the simple minded like myself there are basically 6 steps to it:

1) The company identifies an area of concern or improvement - this may be through introspective analysis or as a result of external review and assessment, or even prodding by a persistent salesperson - either way they have a pain that they want fixed.

2) They look around for potential suppliers of a solution and review one or more in a short list at a summary level. Formal corporate and solution overview presentations are made to the appropriate company decision makers and stakeholders. There may be a few rounds of these for everyone to come to grips with the differences in offerings and approach. This is "pre-sales" and generally provided free of charge by the prospective supplier as their opportunity cost.

3) The company selects a front runner and jointly they work through a more detailed needs analysis, project scope, implementation plan etc and agree on how solution gaps and project risks will be addressed. There may well be a small scale proof of concept (POC) to confirm some specific operational requirements. Quite likely this will be as a chargeable project by the prospective supplier.
This is the qualification period for both sides - the company builds confidence in the proposed solution and supplier that appear to be the best fit and the prospective supplier confirms their comfort with the project requirements, senior management buy-in, available budget, and importantly compelling reason why the company will actually do something rather than just talk a lot and then stay with the status quo. The expected result is both parties decide they would like to proceed.

4) The preferred supplier now puts forward a knowledgable proposal covering objectives, deliverables, roles, responsibilities, time frames and costs.

5) The company places an order - now this is the part that can go badly awry - everything goes well until this part where big decisions need to be made and real money needs to be committed. If both parties know what they are doing then this shouldn't happen very often. The prospective supplier will have smoothed out any objections, addressed the decision makers, confirmed any details, responded acceptably to any objections. Equally the company will have setup the internal decision chain, have an approved budget in hand, nominated a project coordinator and internal team. But sometimes it comes unstuck and for a really weird reason - the sales person doesn't say "to move ahead now we will need to get your purchase order" and the company buyer hasn't read all the signs to know that this is the next step in the process and it is his/hers alone to take. So the one side isn't asking and the other isn't offering and things go off the boil. Weird to have got so far and invested so much to suddenly get lost.

6) The final step is the execution of the sale, project implementation, scope change management, user training, post implementation review, handover from implementation team to support team, final project sign-off. The downhill run, slalom for sure, but still downhill.

Coming from the supplier side I say to all salespeople "remember to ask for the order"!