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Vendor negotiation is very important, seeing the "vendor" as a partner is crucial to success in business. Being flexible and understanding how you can work together is key. Making sure your "vendor negotiation" is done ethically is also so important. As opposed to seeing the vendor negotiation as just another way to win and you lose. Fortunately now many vendor negotiation has become Win / Win scenarios, enabling both you the purchaser and the seller to make a strong long term working relationship. Trust takes many years to build and thankfully there are many ethical companies out there and many ethically driven procurement professionals driving the right kind of vendor negotiation. Renegade Rum and Waterford Distillery: from History to Terroir and Data with Mark Reynier CEO – Episode 31 Visit the Art Of Procurement Podcast WARNING — AI Transcriptions May Cause Grammatically Correct People Serious Stress Nathaniel Schooler 0:09 I'd like to introduce you to Philip Ideson. Philip Ideson is passionate about the role that procurement professionals and leaders can plan in creating a competitive advantage for their organizations. Over a two-decade career spanning the entire procurement value chain from Buyer to Head of Procurement, as a practitioner and consultant, Philip observed first hand the challenges that procurement professionals face in fighting the status quo, and ultimately in fulfilling their potential. Philip founded Art of Procurement in 2015 as a way to empower procurement professionals at all levels to deliver change with confidence; whether from the inspiration of the popular weekly podcast that he hosts, or with targeted solution offerings that guide clients on their journey to transform the impact of procurement. Let's dig into this interesting episode. Well, thank you for that for joining me. I'm really pleased to learn more about these exciting topics. on that. Philip Ideson 1:28 Thank you very much for inviting me on the show. Nathaniel Schooler 1:31 So I think it's best if we start with start with procurement, and then we sort of lead into negotiation if that. So if that's all right. Philip Ideson 1:39 Sure. Nathaniel Schooler 1:40 So where would you start? If you were, if you were thinking about buying something, and you know, you might be an experienced be procurement officer, or you might be just just learning how to buy something? Where do you start? Philip Ideson 1:55 So for somebody who's within the procurement side kind of side of the bed, nice, and they're helping somebody within the business by something, what's really important to me, is understanding truly what the outcomes that person wants to deliver. Because you know, a product or a service that you buy, is really only a vehicle for an outcome. And I think that's something that often gets really lost is we get too fixated on this is what the specification of this widget is, are, these are all the different elements of this particular service, we get so kind of stuck in the weeds of that, that you lose the sight of:- "Actually I want it because we need to increase, you know, the some customer satisfaction!" Let's say :-"We want to bring in increase the conversion rate within our marketing funnel by 1%." It's really focusing on the end game rather than the thing you're buying itself. I think it's just something that's really important to do that we often forget. Nathaniel Schooler 2:53 That's really good advice. Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, there's so many people that certainly in marketing for one example, they're just kind of, they're told to go and do all these things. And they might be tracking the wrong metrics. So I think certainly finding out the right place to start is definitely the way to go. Yeah. Philip Ideson 3:13 Yeah. And metrics is a struggle for procurement folks, because most procurement folks, are measured on cost savings. So they measured,