Web Business Marketing Blog

Do you want to work in sales or purchasing? If you’re currently working in sales, you might think sitting at the other end of the table is immensely more comfortable. Not necessarily.

OK - you don’t have to compete, but acquiring products and services on-time, at the right quality and price and according to specification can be as nerve-wrecking as bidding to meet your target with a bunch of competitors.

Sales managers interact with their counterparts in production control, quality, product design, marketing, etc. But purchasing managers equally interact with dozens of people.

An interesting education experiment at Motorola University challenges teams to build towers according to spec using tinker toys. The product produced by my team wasn’t too stable, and couldn’t stand up on its own, unlike the other teams’ towers. To our surprise, our tower was the winner nevertheless as it followed the spec most closely, though the result was a dysfunctional product. Therefore, specifications are guidelines at best. There is a lot of tacit knowledge in the commercial relation that specs do not capture. The answer is not writing more detailed specifications - it will only congest business relations, as it tends to do with large centralised companies. Trust, goodwill and understanding of each other’s needs are as important as good specifications.

Customers aren’t perfect, nor are suppliers. Sales and purchasing people are part of the team making the business relation work. In a way, sales people work for their customer, as purchasing people work for their suppliers. In the real world, the sales people might work a bit more.