Engaging internal clients

In Buying Market Share I touched on the idea of measuring procurement department effectiveness through the share a category manager has earned (compliance) of the internal market to purchase their good or service as well as the share of an internal client's overall spend that the procurement department has earned. To improve, the procurement department needs to better meet the needs of its market. The simplest way to do this is to understand the market, whether it is for a single category across the organization, or the multi-category spend of an internal business unit.

I created an approach, Client Engagement, stolen from borrowing on skills and techniques from the sales world that allows the procurement team to engage with their clients in order to better understand their requirements and drive improved market share. For readers with experience in strategic sourcing, this level of engaging with a client is similar to what is done during a category sourcing exercise, but moves from being a event driven exercise to embedding it as a recurring procurement department business process. Here’s a graphic that provides a summary of the Client Engagement process.