“The good news is our business unit leaders and functional managers are squarely in your corner. You’ve clearly elevated yourselves above your competitors and you’ve presented a compelling case as to why your offering is the best for us, but I will not allow them to go forward with you.”
This is what a prospective client’s procurement specialist once told me following a two-month courtship. And for business pursuit leaders, these words are chilling. My team had successfully won the hearts and minds of the company’s business associates. However, their procurement team was preventing us from moving forward with a highly coveted assignment. Why? Because I had failed to connect some vitally important dots until it was almost too late.
This pursuit began with a site tour that gave us a front-row seat to the issues the client was experiencing, as well as a chance to start developing a personal relationship with the business associates. Then came the request for proposal and our first interaction with procurement, and after that, the “yellow pad session” took place, which really was just a Q&A discussion without a single yellow pad in site.
During this session, we asked thought-provoking and probing questions that demonstrated we had devoured the information given to us in the RFP and gone far beyond focusing squarely on the questions they had presented to us. After a long series of comments such as, “That’s a really good question,” and “I hadn’t thought about that,” from both the business associates and the procurement, we devised our RFP responses and prepared for the interview.
Here procurement was intimately involved, sending the bidders interview time slots, which were selected on a first-come, first-served basis. And I was all over it, generating a “Wow, that was fast,” from the procurement specialist. We were making the right impression.
Next came the interview. There were about a dozen members of the client’s team gathered around. Business line managers and individuals from finance, IT, engineering, human resources, and procurement were all assembled.
Our agenda was right on target, the team we had put together was industry-leading, and our materials spoke directly to what we knew the client needed most. Walking out of the building that afternoon, we were convinced the project was ours to lose.
A few weeks later, however, I received the phone call recounted above. And in those few, sobering words, it felt like our chance of winning this assignment was disappearing faster than Hillary’s emails.
Why? Because the procurement specialist was concerned with the myriad exceptions our legal team had taken with their proposed contract.
So as calmly and professionally as I could muster, I requested procurement send me a list of concerns so they could be addressed. Fortunately, we had built up enough goodwill for them to agree. So as soon as I got that list–and it was a lengthy one–I reached out to the legal department to ask for help. And guess what? They helped. In fact, legal was awesome. Who knew?
Then an odd thing happened: As we were going through procurement’s concerns, we found that many of them were not applicable. For example, procurement wanted to know why we did not have language referring to the licensing and use of intellectual property. But in my world, there is no such thing, as all deliverables belong to the client. Nothing I do needs a licensing agreement.
So after reviewing each of the concerns in detail, we called procurement. And that’s when I learned the very important lesson that led to this article: The majority of what procurement specialists purchase is IT contract programming. However, IT programming services are nothing like what a commercial real estate project manager does. It started to come together; for in the IT outsourcing space, they would likely have licensed intellectual property (specialty code and programming, for instance) and it would make great sense for them to include some sort of contingency fee in their offering to cover surprises. But in my case, we had a thorough, well-written RFP, a detailed scope, schedule, and team roster, so we did not have a need for any contingencies. As long as we stayed within the agreed confines and the client did not cause us to veer off schedule, we were good.
With this new insight, I alleviated procurement’s concerns by explaining, one by one, the vast differences between the IT services she was accustomed to purchasing and the services we provide at Cushman & Wakefield. As a result, we quickly got through the remaining issues and were able to put them to rest.
The moral of the story? More and more frequently I am finding our clients involving their procurement departments in order to provide strategic sourcing of commercial real estate services. And like any other evolving market influencer, understanding the role, the behavior, the buying background, the place in the pecking order, and the language of a given procurement specialist can make or break the acquisition of an assignment.
Randy Thompson is senior managing director at Cushman & Wakefield Inc. Contact him at [email protected].
