So why don’t buyers talk about their purchase funnel?

Whilst sales and marketing people are always trying to find customers for their product and service, procurement professionals have a similar duty to find and convert the best potential suppliers into the best actual suppliers.

Buyers sometimes see their job as trying to keep suppliers at arms length, to not take sales calls and generally to slow down the purchase funnel.

Surely that is lazy thinking. Imagining that the best suppliers will somehow find their way to you is flawed. Often the best suppliers are doing very well and don’t need to fight their way onto your supplier list.

Let’s take a look at each stage of the funnel from a buyer’s perspective.

Starting with ‘Awareness’, this is often a marketing led approach, people need to know about your company if they want to deal with you. The same is true on the buy-side, if suppliers don’t know you exist then how will they ever offer you the service that is going to transform your business?

All procurement departments should have a strategy for raising awareness of who you are and getting your name ‘out there’ in the supplier community.

Next is ‘Opinion’, a key stage in the fight to attract great suppliers.

What is the feeling about you within the supplier community? What do current suppliers say about you? Are you easy to do business with? Are you a long-term customer? Will you help them achieve their aims?

Tracking and measuring whether you are an attractive customer to potential suppliers should be a fundamental part of your purchase funnel.

‘Consideration’ — How do they get on your radar, how do they engage with you?

Is it obvious? This is sometimes the hardest part for a buyer because you can’t spend all day every day taking cold calls or meeting with potential suppliers, you would get nothing done.

Unfortunately instead of developing strategies to deal with this problem, buyers have often stuck their head in the sand and avoided having to deal with prospective suppliers.

I used to have a boss (hello Kelvin) who would always say “how do you know that wasn't the call that saved you a million pounds” when you refused to take a prospective supplier call.

What buyers need at this stage is a proactive approach. You can’t take every call or every meeting but what can you do? Help suppliers find the best way of connecting with you in the right place and at the right time.

Have some way of creating a database of potential suppliers and keep them updated so that when an opportunity arises you have an active and engaged list of prospects all vying for your business.

LinkedIn can be a useful tool here although my previous article on LinkedIn suggests that they may not be that interested in this side of the market.

The final two stages of the funnel ‘Preference’ and ‘Purchase’ are far more familiar to buyers. ‘Preference’ is sourcing and ‘Purchase’ is placing an actual order.

We should still be considering how we get the best possible suppliers through this stage of the process but we should also be considering what impact this part of the process has on the rest of the funnel.

We don’t want potentially good suppliers who failed to get the order to take themselves off the list of prospects list. If suppliers who fail to win a tender feel well respected and well treated then they are more likely to stay in the funnel and potentially to enhance your reputation as a customer of choice.