On the surface, procurement and sales are opposing disciplines. Look closer and they are two sides of the same coin.

For most of my career on the buying side of the table, I treated sales as the function on the other side and little more. Now that I work in my training programs with both sales and procurement teams, the overlap is hard to miss. The two functions share core skills, and both sides can learn a lot from the very people they often tend to see only as their tactical counterpart in a negotiation process.

To see what procurement can learn from sales and why it indeed needs sales skills more than ever before to succeed, let’s first look into the principal challenges procurement is being faced with.

Procurement runs the money and struggles to prove its worth.

Procurement runs the majority of what a company spends externally. That should make it one of the most influential functions in the business. Instead, it is one of the least trusted, and much of that is self-inflicted.

For a good twenty years, from the 1990s onwards, the discipline has defined its worth by savings alone, a number few outside procurement believe. Still today, procurement professionals see savings as their key KPI. The reason is simple. Savings can be easily measured against a straightforward baseline. The problem? This baseline is often set by procurement itself, so a price rise can be booked as a win if the forecast (and hence the baseline) was worse. The buyer knows this, and so does the CFO. The scorecard procurement points to as proof of value is the same one that has cost it credibility with the people it actually serves.

These people are the CEO, the R&D director, the business unit head who raises the requisition. They do not want a savings report. They want a function that understands the business well enough to bring the outside supplier world into the organization to drive competitive advantage: an internal challenger, an advisor, at times an uncomfortable voice of reason that uses supply capabilities to help the company grow. That is the function they have been asking for since the early 2000s. Most procurement teams were trained to deliver something else and are stuck in the past, delivering cost savings.

The skill procurement is missing is the one sales lives by: serving a customer.

Serving an internal customer means for procurement to understand a need before the requisition arrives, to translate it into the right supplier capability, and to persuade people who do not report to you to back the solution. That is not a buying skill as procurement has traditionally defined it. It is a selling skill.

Sales professionals do this for a living. Some better, some worse, but it is what sales is all about. An unapologetic customer focus. Sales professionals strive to understand a customer’s problem, connect it to a solution, and influence a room of strong, opinionated stakeholders to act. You, procurement professionals out there, are the proof it works, because you are the customers they have spent years selling to.

A salesperson’s customer focus is what modern procurement needs, turned inward. Procurement’s stakeholders are effectively their customers. Anticipate the internal customer’s need, identify the supplier capability that meets it, link relationships across the company boundary, and communicate the value clearly so that people act: a customer-first procurement approach.

Some procurement teams have quietly done a version of this for years. Every business case built to move a stakeholder off a fixed specification is an act of selling. Nonetheless, most buyers have simply never been trained to do this or to see it that way. There is no support to buy customer-first more effectively and more consistently.

Two sides of the same coin.

Procurement and sales look like opposites. They are the same function seen from opposite ends of the table. Both sit at the centre of a stakeholder network, both translate needs across a company boundary, and both earn their keep the same way, by putting the customer first. The role now open to procurement is the in-house seller with deep external market expertise: advising on business needs, challenging opinions, and linking outside partners to inside needs to create value.

Marc Engel, former Chief Supply Chain Officer at Unilever, said it plainly: buying is the new selling. When the most senior buyers in the world talk like the sharpest sellers, the direction of travel is clear.

For many teams this is close to a reversal of how they were taught to buy. It is also the difference between the buyers who get augmented by the technology arriving in their function and the ones who get automated out of it. The place to start is the other side of your next negotiation. Those people have spent their careers learning how a customer buys and wants to be sold to. It is time procurement did the same.

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This is the shift my team and I at FIVIS train procurement organizations to make, using a model built on the customer’s side of the table. If it is the direction your function needs to move, let’s talk: info@fivis.io