Ever wondered what it’s like to be on both sides of the sales negotiation table?

Our guest this week, Mike Lander, CEO of Piscari and Chairman of Re:signal, is a successful entrepreneur, an ex-procurement director, and a highly sought-after sales & negotiation consultant. He’s not only grown companies to over £20 million in revenue but has also negotiated hundreds of deals worth over £500 million as a buyer.

Mike’s unique perspective gives him invaluable insights into how to qualify leads better, convert more deals, and land the best possible outcomes, especially when dealing with tough procurement teams.

Join us as we chat with Mike about his experiences and learn how to close more deals, boost your margins, and ultimately drive higher company valuations! 

To learn more about Mike and his work, visit https://piscari.com/negotiation-guide/ 

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Expert Tips for Winning Procurement Deals

Introduction

Jeff Tomlin: I’m Jeff Tomlin and on this episode, we’re pleased to welcome Mike Lander.

Mike is a sales and procurement expert with a distinguished history of scaling businesses and driving revenue growth. 

As CEO of Piscari Ltd and Chairman of Re:signal, he has raised over £6.5 million in capital and grown companies to over £20 million. Having held leadership roles on both the buying and selling side, Mike brings a unique perspective to the challenges faced by sales and business development teams. 

With a deep understanding of procurement processes and buyer psychology, gained from negotiating deals of over £500 million, Mike provides actionable strategies for sales success.

Get ready Conquerors for Mike Lander coming up next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local Podcast.

Mike Lander, a Procurement Expert, Shares his Journey from Buyer to Consultant.

Jeff Tomlin: As any type of organization selling a good and service and you may want to be looking at larger organizations and selling into bigger companies,  bigger deals, you may have to deal with procurement organizations at some point. And whether or not that’s a path for your company, learning how to work with procurement teams is transferable to almost any type of business development, as you’ll find in my chat with my current guest, Mike Lander, CEO of Piscari. Welcome to the Conquer Local Podcast. This is a gentleman that is responsible for managing deals in excess of half a billion dollars or British pounds, which is incredible. Mike, how are you doing today?

Mike Lander: I’m good, Jeff. I’m very good indeed. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks for inviting me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Jeff Tomlin: Tell us a story behind the name Piscari.

Mike Lander: Yeah, sure. So my wife designed it. My wife’s a very talented marketer and brander, and we were talking years ago, and a lot of what I do is about helping others to help themselves. So the old kind of fable I think it was about if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach him how to fish, you feed him or her for a lifetime. And so what I do as a consultant is I work with clients now. I’m an ex buyer, ex procurement director. I now work with sellers, so I work with people trying to sell their services to other companies and I help them see things through a buyer’s lens, and that’s what makes me different. So I transfer skills to them, which is knowledge and skills and tools to help them become better at what they do when they meet other people, so they don’t always need me going forward.

View Procurement as a Partnership, not an Adversary.

Jeff Tomlin: One of the things that you talk about, Mike, is that organizations that are working with procurement teams, you should approach them as you’re approaching a partnership or think of it as a partnership. And so maybe to kick off, talk about some of the key elements of a really successful strategic partnership that salespeople should keep in mind.

Mike Lander: So I think a lot of salespeople, Jeff, think that procurement are the devil. They think we’re to be avoided, they think that we are going to ruin the deal and that we’re going to basically just take money off the table. And the reality is we’re just another stakeholder. If you look at any organization, as your listeners start to scale up and they may be selling to bigger companies and they’re dealing with not just now maybe the CMO but now the CIO and also the head of HR and also some of these procurement people, and we’re just another stakeholder. It just happens that we’ve got quite a different agenda. So a couple of myths about those kinds of partnerships. Salespeople tend to think that we own the money. Well, procurement don’t own the money. The money is owned by the marketing director or the IT director. Our job is to be the guardians, the custodians of the governance and the company’s money so that we spend it wisely. But if you enter a relationship with a procurement person in the wrong way, tactically, aggressively, defensively, then don’t be surprised if we treat you like a commodity. And how do you buy commodities? How do you buy nails and how do you buy wood? You buy it based upon price and volume. And that’s a problem, is that sellers need to think about us as being a partner and about it being a longer-term deal where we’re going to work together over hopefully many years. There’s something really famous in procurement called the Kraljic Matrix. I’ll mention it for one simple reason for your listeners. It sounds complicated. It’s not. This guy, Kraljic, created this matrix, and the basic idea is this. If you look at what you are selling and then you think about it from a buyer’s perspective, on the vertical axis is how much impact do you have on the buyer’s profit? How much value do you drive for them? And then on the horizontal axis is, well, how rare are you? How hard is it to find people like you to do that, that drives that kind of profit? Well, if you are in the top right-hand corner, you’re a strategic partner. You’ve got a lot of impact on my business, big profit impact, and you’re very hard to find. Well, if you’re in that box as a procurement person, I want to form a partnership with you. I want to work with you, I want to collaborate with you because it’s in my interest. However, if you don’t position your service correctly or your product and you’ve got no impact on my profit or very little, and I think there’s thousands of you around, then I’ll treat you as a commodity. We buy commodities on price, on volume, on tough negotiated deals, on extended payment terms. So it’s up to the seller to work out where do they fit. Are they going to be a strategic partner or are they going to let themselves be treated as a tactical buy?

Demonstrate Value, not just Price.

Jeff Tomlin: That’s a fantastic insight, and I think that that’s probably important for any type of sales organization, no matter who you’re selling to, to understand where you’re positioned in the market. And it only makes sense that the people on the other end are going to treat you differently based on how you’re positioned.

Mike Lander: Yeah, and it’s up to the seller. It’s not my job as a buyer to work out your positioning. It’s your job as a seller to tell me why you are so special, why you are so different, what the return is. You wouldn’t believe, Jeff, how many people I talk to now that I work on the sell side, and they talk about their sales process and when they have to negotiate with procurement. And I stop them and say, “Have you described how much value you’re going to create and what the ROI is?” And they’re like, “Well, not really, but we’ve talked about price and how our competitors are priced.” And I’m like, “Well, look, if I’m buying something and let’s say I’m going to buy it for 100K, then I expect to get from a hundred thousand dollars, $500,000 value. If you can’t show me how I’m going to get that kind of value out of this interaction, then I’m just going to look for a cheaper price, because you can’t tell me how much value is going to get created.” Whereas if you could do me a little pencil sell, Jeff, the old pencil sell technique when we were taught as salespeople, like, this is your baseline and this is the problem that you’ve got and this is the kind of value of that problem, and if I could solve it for a fifth of what it costs you, then would that be of benefit? People are like, “Yeah, that’d be great.” Now, it might be five to one, it might be seven to one, it might be four to one, but you’ve got to give them some idea of what kind of value is going to get created in this exchange that we’re going to have.

Understand the Procurement Buyer’s Role and Deal Size.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah, and do you find working with procurement organizations that the process is different depending on the company that you’re dealing with? And do you have to modify your approach a lot based on whether you’re going into blind RFP processes or you’re going one-on-one with a team all the way from discovery all the way through contracting?

Mike Lander: Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things that are worth noting, and there’s no reason that your listeners should know this unless they’ve dealt with a lot of procurement people, but we fall into two buckets. They call us direct procurement people or indirect procurement people, and the difference is important because let’s say I’m Walmart and I’m in procurement at Walmart and I’m buying apples, bananas, oranges. The things that consumers buy, that’s direct procurement. Every time I buy something, if I buy a million oranges, every 10th of a cent I shave off that orange makes a big difference to our profit. So direct procurement people are exceptionally well-trained, very, very, very good negotiators and are used to buying on a unit price basis. If you look at indirect procurement, so for example, I’m Walmart again but I’m now buying marketing services, or I’m buying IT services, or I’m buying cleaning services. I’m buying indirect, so I’m an indirect procurement person. The danger is if you take a direct procurement person and put them in an indirect procurement role, imagine how they’re going to behave. They’re going to behave like they’re buying oranges when they’re buying marketing services or IT services or accounting services, very different. So I think you’ve got to know where the procurement person has come from and what they’re used to buying. And the second thing is you’ve got to know where this person’s come from, what their background is and what role they’re carrying out now, and then the other thing you’ve got to realize is you’ve got to work out how big a deal is this for this organization? Because if it’s a really, really big deal like a million dollars, which is a decent size deal, some are hundreds of millions but let’s say it’s a million dollar deal, the stakes are high so the process, the buying process, the RFP process is going to be long, it’s going to be rigorous. There’s going to be lots of hoops to jump through, the contracts will be big. It’ll take a lot to get through to the final three and then to be down-selected. Whereas if I’m buying something that’s say 50K, it’s going to be a faster process, it’s going to be a shorter RFP, it’s going to be a bit more tactical in terms of the way I buy potentially, not always, but potentially, and so yeah, the dynamics are a bit different. You’ve got to work out how important is this to the organization.

Build Relationships with Procurement Early.

Jeff Tomlin: So working with procurement organizations, oftentimes, you have to build trust with them and you have to have a collaborative approach. Tell me a little bit about some strategies, sales strategies that the sales professionals can follow to think about and nurture long-term relationships and long-term relationship thinking going through the sales process.

Mike Lander: Really important point, Jeff, really important. So if you try and build a relationship with me in the RFP, in the process, it’s just been issued, you’re responding, it’s going to fail. Why? Because I have to keep my distance, I have to treat all suppliers equally, and I’ve got to run a process. The time to build a relationship with me is 12 to 18 months ahead of when a deal might be done, so how do you do that? So what I’d say is, look, let’s say you are targeting any big Fortune 500 company. As part of your sales strategy for that kind of account, you’d say, well, who’s the procurement person? Who’s likely to buy this in terms of the person that will issue the RFP? And then I’m going to try and get an interaction with them, maybe on LinkedIn. I’m going to say to them, “I’m not selling to you.” So I don’t know you yet. We just met Jeff virtually on LinkedIn. “I’m not trying to sell to you at all, but we’ve got some thought leadership about this problem that we solve, and the industry and the economics and how value gets created. Can I just send you a thought leadership paper? I promise you it’s not a sales document. It’s an education piece.” If you’ve got through on an exchange on LinkedIn, they’ll probably say, “Yeah, that’s fine.” So do what you say you’ll do, you send them a thought leadership paper. The next thing is you go three months down the line. “Jeff, I sent you this thought leadership paper about three months ago. We’re running a breakfast for other procurement people that buy these kinds of services. Would you like to come? It’s an education piece. It’s not a sales piece. We’re running it as an organization. It’s going to be some of your peers. There’ll be someone in the room who’s quite interesting for you to listen to. That might be a chief procurement officer from a big company or someone else, it might be a client that you’ve worked with. Would you like to come along?” Again, the chances are breakfasts are good because it’s before my day starts, and it’s the first time to meet me, have a conversation with me, have a coffee and start to build that relationship. And I think sellers often only focus on the economic buyer, the marketing director, the IT director, and they fail to think about the procurement person that’s going to run the process. And that’s a big mistake because if you can build a trusting relationship with me as a procurement person ahead of this RFP, I’m far more likely to be reasonable with you than if I don’t know you at all.

Jeff Tomlin: Yeah. And that person is your champion or your detractor in through the process.

Mike Lander: Yeah, exactly.

Focus on Risk Mitigation and Contract Nuances.

Jeff Tomlin: And it’s interesting talking about it, it doesn’t seem like it’s that much… The thinking around it isn’t that much different than dealing with other enterprise organizations that don’t necessarily have a procurement team. You have to make sure you take care of the relationships, you have to build trust, you have to build credibility, and you have to know and deeply understand what their process is like and the things that they care about. So I wanted to ask, when it comes to handling objections, when objections come up from the team on price or around risks, whatnot, are there different types of considerations that the salespeople need to think about when handling objections, or is it sort of the same process by which you deal with other types of buying organizations?

Mike Lander: I think the first thing is risk. So it’s counterintuitive to a salesperson to talk about risk, but they have to. A procurement person’s job, part of it is to manage risk. We manage operational risk, we manage supply risk, we manage reputational risk, and all sorts of risks. And so actually, as a salesperson, a great thing to do with me is talk about risk, because then if you can talk about risk and you understand risk and explain to me how you’re going to mitigate risk, then the chances are we’re going to get a better collaboration going, I would’ve said. The other thing is about when you are negotiating with a procurement person, which is often when the concession handling, the objections occur, is that you’ve got to remember that behind me also is sat a lawyer. So we’ve got a master services agreement and there’s a lawyer sat on my shoulder, and there are certain things I can and can’t give. But one pretty generic truth is this. If you get a contract from procurement and you are told basically, “We’re now going to negotiate the contract,” what procurement will say to you is the master services agreement is non-negotiable. In this 50-page document, every single term is non-negotiable. You cannot redline that document. So you go, “Well, then I can’t negotiate with you.” What they don’t tell you is in a contract, there’s these things called schedules. Well, the schedule normally overrides the main document, so what they don’t tell you is if you’ve got a variation you want, you stick it into the schedule and that overrides the main document, and then there’s no markup of their main document but you get what you want. So that’s the one consideration I think that’s very important.

AI is Transforming Procurement and Sales.

Jeff Tomlin: What a great insight. Mike, do you see the role of procurement teams changing at all as we’re in a much more digital world now and dealing with more digital goods and services? Have you seen it? How is it changing?

Mike Lander: So if I look at it from the supply side for a second, so I’ve actually also, I’ve got an AI product, so I’m turning myself into an AI product, my advice to sellers around how do you qualify better? How do you convert more? How do you negotiate better? I’ve realized that in the age of generative AI, in the next five years, yeah, my services will be required, but a lot of my knowledge and thinking will be available via generative AI systems, so I’ve gone, “I’ll make my own instead.” So I’m building it with a partner, so I’m building a product which is aimed at qualifying opportunities better, drafting the first proposal so that you’ve got a head start. Salespeople hate writing RFP proposals so you give them a head start, it drafts the first response, scores it, and then you can submit. And the reason I mentioned that first is because let’s say that the proposal market as a seller starts to become dominated by AI systems that generate the first draft, and the salesperson can then master or corral the other subject matter experts to contribute into the proposal before they send it. Well, if that happens, then all the procurement people are going to start to see very similar high-quality looking proposals, but way before that happens, procurement are starting to use AI to write the RFP. So they can do more of them now, so they can start to RFP and tender lower value goods and services because they’ve got more time now because it’s semi-automated. So ultimately, if we’re not careful, AI will write the RFP and AI will respond to the RFP. Well, now, how do you select a supplier? So if you take an ultimate kind of Armageddon view of the world, then yes, procurement would fundamentally have to change and go back to the old relationship style of selling. What’s really going to happen I think in reality is there’ll be an in-between stage, so for a good number of years, maybe a decade or so, AI will be used, definitely. It will be much more technology-enabled. And so to a seller, what’s going to happen is if you are not adopting generative AI machine learning in your proposal process in the next five years, eventually, well, you just won’t be around, because your competitors are and they’ll be much better at producing more accurate responses that answer all the questions, that provide evidence to answer their questions on top, and insights that the buyer never even knew about, so you’ll just get wiped out.

Mike Lander Shares Procurement Trends, AI Future, and Contact Details.

Jeff Tomlin: Mike Lander, this is just an absolute ton of amazing insights into the world of procurement, and I could listen to you talk about this for some time. If people wanted to continue the conversation with you, first off, how do they learn more about your organization and the services that you offer, and what is the best way to reach out to you?

Mike Lander: Thanks, Jeff. So it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I thoroughly enjoy these conversations. I always do. My company, if you go to piscari.com, you can see all our information on there. Sign up to the newsletter, it’s on the front page. And then about me, contact me on LinkedIn. I’m Mike Lander on LinkedIn, so anyone’s very welcome to contact me.

Jeff Tomlin: Mike, I want to thank you for taking time out of your very busy day and spending a little bit of that day on the Conquer Local Podcast with us. Thanks so much and hope to chat with you again in the future.

Mike Lander: That’s been a real pleasure. Thanks, Jeff.

Conclusion

Jeff Tomlin: I was right in the intro whether you’re working with procurement teams or not, that type of conversation is relevant no matter who you are. 

The first takeaway here on this chat is about redefining the Sales-Procurement Relationship. Salespeople must shift their perspective on procurement from adversary to partner. By understanding procurement’s role, goals, and challenges, salespeople can build stronger relationships and increase their chances of closing deals. Effective communication, strategic positioning, and a long-term outlook are essential for success in this dynamic relationship.

The next takeaway that I’ve got is about the Impact of AI on Sales and Procurement. The increasing use of AI will transform both sales and procurement functions. Salespeople must focus on developing skills that complement AI capabilities, such as strategic thinking, relationship building, and problem-solving. Additionally, understanding how AI will be used by procurement teams is crucial for staying ahead of the competition.

If you’ve enjoyed Mike’s episode discussing  Sales and Procurement Partnership, keep the conversation going and revisit some of the older episodes from the archives: Check out Episode 715: Redefining Sales Success: From Seller’s Journey to Buyer’s Experience with Richard Harris or Episode 639: Key Steps and Strategies to Prepare Your Agency for Sale with Richard Parker.

Until next time, I’m Jeff Tomlin. Get out there and be awesome!