How to Engage with Procurement with Bruce Scheer and Dean Edwards

Bruce Scheer: Welcome to the ValuePros Show where value pros get value ready. Hi. I'm your host, Bruce Scheer. And in this episode, I'm wearing a suit jacket and you're gonna find out why. We're tackling a critical but often overlooked aspect of the sales process, being approval ready. And joining us is Dean Edwards, one of our affiliates of Value Pros and former head of procurement for industry giants, Levi Strauss and Ingram Micro. With his wealth of experience and unique insider perspective, Dean will shed light on what happens behind closed doors in procurement and how sales professionals can position themselves for success. Get ready for invaluable insights that could transform your approach to procurement and to complex b to b sales.

Bruce Scheer: Let's dive in. So, Dean, just based on your experience, again, being behind the four walls and looking at these deals when they finally hit your desk, what typically is off the rails, which just derails one of the bigger deals that you often see?

Dean Edwards: Great question, Bruce. Probably the biggest one that we see is missed is the internal rate of return for the company. So the sales team haven't figured out what the ROI needs to be to justify the purchase. The stakeholder gets too excited with the solution that's out there, and they don't think through the total costs that are involved with everything. And if you imagine it's something a bit more sophisticated, for example, like software implementation, it's not just the software costs themselves. It's also the cost of all the integrators coming in, project managers, consultants. They all weigh down on the internal rate of return. And that one we see being missed all the time.

Dean Edwards: The great sales teams go in, find out what the internal rate of return are. And I have to say with a kind of sneaky admiration, then work out what the value of the product is they're trying to sell based on what the rate of return is that they can project relative to the cost of their product.

Bruce Scheer: That's perfect. So the I guess the the mandate is for the value professional really to understand what that hurdle rate is or that internal rate of return, and then how can they demonstrate that they can beat that in a way that's gonna instill confidence for everybody else.

Dean Edwards: And if you get right back to the basic discovery stage in your model, that should be key. What's the rate of return? Is gosh. Is there a budget? I've even seen the ones come through where everybody's been excited. Procurement have been told by the stakeholder, yeah, we've got the money, the deals put together. And then at the final moment, the stakeholder goes, oops. Yeah. I don't actually have the budget, which is not only frustrating for the sales team, it's hellishly frustrating for the procurement team as well. So we're not innocent

Bruce Scheer: in this by any means. Yeah. No. Where you guys are gonna get the bad guys. Everybody's coming, you

Dean Edwards: know, excited. They will. The other big one, Bruce, that I see a lot of companies tripping up on and they should be prepared for is information security. And they get a bit surprised when procurement's involved, but part of our relationship with legal is we look after the commercial arrangements in most instances. Mhmm. And as such, we have a strong partnership with the infosec teams. And we're looking out to make sure that they've gone through the infosec process. Time and time again, I've seen deals come forward and held up for 2, 3 months just on the basis that the infosec requirements have to be hammered out, and they should have been taken care of much earlier in the process.

Dean Edwards: And the whole deal closure would have been a lot quicker otherwise.

Bruce Scheer: That's interesting. Yeah. So I think what you're telling us is get involved early. Figure out what these parameters are, both from an ROI, IRR type of perspective, what's the business case need to be looking like, and then all the other things that need to get approval as well, ultimately. And don't start late, especially information security. Yeah. I I Dean, personally, I've been in involved in sales with information security and some funny stories, some in intensely unfunny stories in terms of all the hurry up and scramble and trying to meet those approval requirements just to

Dean Edwards: get that deal done. And it's comes down to this key element, Bruce. Understand what the process is supposed to be at the outset, and there's two ways of going about that. Sometimes you'll find that the procurement team have mapped out the process on a website that external vendors have access to. Other times, it's a question of sitting down with the procurement team and asking them, what's the process and what's the key requirements as we go through this?

Bruce Scheer: Mhmm.

Dean Edwards: And they actually take that as a very positive thing. It shows that you're willing to play by the rules, that you understand that you need to submit things. The key for the salesperson is to make sure that they've got their organisation lined up for a quick turnaround of these kinds of things.

Bruce Scheer: Absolutely. Yep. No. And totally makes sense. Well, Dean, we did talk about sellers trying to do an end run and how those end runs typically don't end well. I wanted to ask you though, just your experience across industry, different purchasing functions. A lot of my experiences personally have been I'm involved with purchasing and they're trying to beat me down on price. And it's kind of a zero sum game and it's totally no fun.

Bruce Scheer: But I get into those types of dialogues a lot, which ValuePro shouldn't, because we should be leading with value and helping share that value, create value, and share value. But I'd love to understand from you in the purchasing world, are there purchasing functions that are into that talking about value? Is it all about price? Tell me your perspective on what you've seen across industry.

Dean Edwards: This envisage procurement is a catchall term, Bruce. And within procurement, there's 3 types of procurement teams. The first is purchasing. Purchasing is best viewed as a transactional capability. And yes, they do have savings targets. Their primary need is to get the transactions through the system as quickly as possible. Typically, there's not enough resources for the volume of work. So to be effective as a sales organization, the more you can support them with efficiency, quick turnaround time, the more they appreciate and are likely to support you.

Dean Edwards: They do have cost savings goals. And that's on a very, very simplified basis normally, which is price times volume. And that's how they derive value. So they're very process focused. How do they channel stuff through? And that's gonna be your arm wrestling over the price. Very price centric. The second form of procurement team is the sourcing team. Think of these guys as the stormtroopers a lot of the time.

Dean Edwards: They're sent in to derive significant cost benefit to the organization. You'll often find them engaged when there's some sort of financial crisis or if a company's looking to go to IPO and shape up the balance sheet. You'll see more of them in that kind of mode then. And their focus is on total cost of ownership. And this is where the sales teams need to come in and try and steer the argument more to how does their product or service inherently provide benefits and reduce cost for the customer. And we tend to find if that's been misunderstood, the type of organization that's been dealt with by the sales team, they'll be very much in defending price and not in promoting the value of the product and what it means to the client organization. Though weirdly, the sales people typically do share those benefits with the stakeholder as part of the sales process. So there's a disconnect there, and it needs to be cohesive.

Dean Edwards: Particularly, if you imagine that scenario where the CFO is turning around to the procurement representative and asking them if they support the deal. The stakeholder will go on the broader value proposition. The procurement guy, if he's or she's not been involved in this, is gonna have a more limited view. So this is where there needs to be much more interaction and interplay between the two entities. So very much sourcing looks at total cost of ownership. What's the life cycle cost of the product? What are the consumables that's involved? What's the service requirements? What is the impact of the product within the organization? Will it reduce processing times? Will it increase efficiency? Very much how they look at things. And then lastly, category management is less project focused, which is where you'll see sourcing orientate themselves, and takes a look at an entire spend category. And it's looking at the complete value picture associated with that category of expenditure.

Dean Edwards: And they spend an awful lot of time influencing stakeholders and the company, making sure they're aligned with the strategies, and looking to generate value in its most complete sense. And yes, they will look at cost savings. They will look at cost efficiency. But they're also looking at how can the supplier help them with product innovation, with increasing margins, access into new markets, that type of thing. You'll tend to see category management teams in more innovative technological industries, biotech, some of the software organizations, some hardware as well. But you very much associate them with the high innovation, high turnaround of product offerings from the company. That's where they need that innovation, that drive, that turnaround from their suppliers.

Bruce Scheer: How interesting. So, yeah, this is quite a spectrum across purchasing, sourcing, and category management types of functions. And are there functions that have flavors of all 3, or is it more of a culture of one thing, like that organization, they're very centric on purchasing that procurement function versus this organization's more centric on category management. Help me understand that, Dean.

Dean Edwards: Okay. You're quite correct. There are blends of the 3 that take place within organizations. There's only one organization I worked for that didn't have a purchasing capability. And that resulted in a huge amount of issues for both the company itself, and more importantly, for the suppliers. Because purchasing helps get the transactions through, helps get the the vendor set up, helps with the payments. If they don't exist, that falls to the sourcing or category management teams, and that's not their strong suit. That's not what they're equipped to do.

Dean Edwards: So huge problems if they're not there. Sometimes you'll find the purchasing teams or the purchasing capability resides within a shared service center. And that's fine. They'll still work very closely with sourcing and category management. You will see some elements of sourcing and category management come to play. And that has more to do with the maturity of the stakeholders within a company. So if you've got a very forward thinking stakeholder who's very effective at partnering with procurement, you'll see more of the category management tendencies come out. If they are more basic in terms of their needs and their perspective, have a more transactional mentality as a stakeholder, you'll see more of the sourcing come through.

Bruce Scheer: Okay. So I guess what would be some of the implications then for the value seller, the value professional? What should they be thinking about as they approach an organization and start to engage with the the procurement function?

Dean Edwards: They need to find out, 1st and foremost, what is the overriding character of the procurement organization? Is it more heavily weighted to sourcing, to purchasing, or to category management? But they've also got to be mindful of the particular procurement professional that's in front of them. How do they exhibit? What do they orientate themselves towards? And you've got to look not so much at what they're called, but what they do and what they say. And I can't emphasize this enough. So many teams call themselves something they're not, either because historically that's how the organization has tagged them. But sometimes it's aspirational. You'll see purchasing teams calling themselves sourcing teams because they think they should be aspiring to that, and that's one of the things that will help them get there. Similarly, we're sourcing to category management. So don't pay attention so much to the job titles and the functional name.

Dean Edwards: Pay more attention to the language that's used and the actions that you see from the procurement professionals.

Bruce Scheer: Gotcha. And are there any behavioral shifts on the value professional side, the seller, in terms of how to deal with each, the things that they should be thinking about and any Yeah.

Dean Edwards: So each instance, they've got to be promoting value. They've just got to make sure that how they present that value resonates with the particular audience. So for a purchasing professional, they are going to really value anything that streamlines processes, means they can turn around things quicker. They are gonna have a price times volume focus when it comes to cost. You've got to help them through that and help them appreciate that there's greater benefits than just on the price. So a discussion may go, look, we appreciate we're probably 5% more in cost than our competition. However, the benefits of our service or product will net you 15% in benefit. And in years 2 to 3, we typically see that rise to 20%.

Dean Edwards: That's a good way of presenting a value argument. With sourcing, it's very much about firstly, the total cost of ownership. Come in with a cost model, showing them what the total costs are, and how you're more competitive based on your offering. But it's also about the other points of value beyond that cost element. So typically, the teams that I ran for sourcing and category management, only 40% of their objectives would be cost savings based. The other 60% would be made up of things like driving efficiencies, realizing sustainability goals, supplier reduction, corporate social responsibility, those types of things, which were important to the company. And it was typically down to the procurement team to enact those on behalf of the organisations. So somebody coming to me and saying, yeah, I've got a really effective total cost of ownership, but by the way, I'm cognizant of these other goals and objectives that you have, and the company reports a good place to pick up on these if not from interviews with the procurement professional.

Dean Edwards: Mhmm. Bringing those into the mix has real value for the sourcing team, and similarly for category management. But what category management's gonna be really interested on aside from the cost and the ultimate profitability for the companies from using the product or service is they tend to have a view of what the company needs 6 to 7 years out. And being able to show a trajectory that aligns with that is hugely powerful and is going to lead to you being more favored as a supplier. And you'd be stunned, Bruce, the amount of companies that get very secretive about their product pipeline and the pathway for growth for themselves. And it's to their detriment versus the others that actively engage and partner when they see a category manager across the table.

Bruce Scheer: Oh, how interesting. Yeah. Where they can paint a picture of a road map and the value associated with that and having the category manager get excited about that future potential value.

Dean Edwards: But they got to be prepared to walk that talk. It's one thing to present a rosy picture. This is what's going on. What the buyer and the company are gonna be very sensitive to is, do they actually see progress along that pathway? Or is it just empty words? And they will be quite ruthless if they don't see that followed up on. So it's very key post contract that's actually committed to and demonstrated back to the customer. And there's a strong focus from category managers on supplier development, helping them get to where they need to go to. So the more constructive and open that dialogue is, the harder it is for another supplier to come in and displace that company.

Bruce Scheer: How frequently is a seller going to be interacting with category management versus sourcing versus purchasing? Do you know what the percentages would be? And I'm just thinking getting into real category managers would be a little unusual. I'm just curious across industry what these percent might look like.

Dean Edwards: A category manager will be balancing their time between managing the internal stakeholders and their external suppliers. You can expect them to be engaged probably 3 times more with the suppliers than you will see with the sourcing teams. You have to remember, sourcing teams are very project focused. So if there's a project in front of them, either generated from the stakeholder, or they've generated a project themselves because they've been surveying the spend records, looking at where the money's going, looking for opportunities, or the contract management system is telling them there's a contract up and they got 6 months to get ready, and they need to go through a process. That's when they'll engage heavily. But outside of that, they will do some supplier management. That's more about tracking performance, making sure that they're getting what they expected from the contract. It's not a more open, forward looking conversation that you'd have with a category manager.

Bruce Scheer: Mhmm.

Dean Edwards: And purchasing, very transactional. They don't have too much time to get involved in supplier management or supplier development. Doesn't mean they don't engage with suppliers, but it tends to be around immediate needs. And they tend to be responding to immediate procurement requests, purchasing reqs from the stakeholders. And that's what initiates their action a lot of the time.

Bruce Scheer: Excellent. Well, Dean, this has just been fantastic. Just kinda laying out the world in those 3 different segments, if you would, of people and functions of procurement. What other advice would you have for value professionals trying to sell in? And and again, just getting everything approval ready, making sure everybody sees the value and this deal can go forward. What else would you recommend?

Dean Edwards: So first and foremost, don't wait until there's a purchase or an opportunity to start engaging with the procurement team. Do it way early on. And the mistake I see sales teams make is that they turn up, request an appointment, and get frustrated if they don't get an appointment. If they do get an appointment, they tend to waste it by presenting what their product or services as a solution to something when they haven't even ascertained what procurement's problem is or what its need is. They tend to assume that because the stakeholder has a need, that it's mirrored and that procurement have to satisfy that. It's not true. We have our own sets of needs, goals, and objectives. And yes, we need to look after the the stakeholder and the business needs.

Dean Edwards: But there's all these additional things that we're looking for that have to be satisfied. And I've had meetings with many sales people. All they've done is present how there's their product is a lady's whiz bang invention and superior to everybody else. My eyes glaze over. If you start talking my language and start saying to me, okay, this is the benefit that it brings to you on top of what it's doing for the rest of the business, that's fantastic. Even better, take the time to figure out what my problems and issues are. And find so many sales people don't do that. There's some great sales teams out there and they do and they're really effective.

Dean Edwards: They get into understanding how they can help you, where they can bring you benefit, and they leverage that to understand how they can do that with the other functions such as finance audit, infosec, and so forth. But often it's a very narrow perspective they come into the meeting with. And even that's probably oversimplifying a positive environment. Most procurement teams have been deluged with requests from sales people every week, and it's the 20, 30, 40, 50 emails. It's the phone calls. It's the LinkedIn requests. And my pet peeve is somebody will connect with me on LinkedIn. And the next thing I know, they've sent me a message telling me to make an appointment with them so that they can come and sell their product or service to me.

Dean Edwards: I haven't got time for it. I'm spending a lot of time focusing with the internal stakeholders, building relationships there to to get on my radar map. Start providing value to me very, very early on. Start the social selling. Start coming in with some emails. Provide an article or some resources of value to me, and present those. And do so over a period of a number of weeks, couple of months, and build up credibility that way. But immediately launching into, I've made a connection, you're gonna meet with me, and I'm gonna sell you my product, and everything's gonna be fantastic, that salesperson's gonna be disappointed.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And as we've discussed before, if procurement's disappointed, very often those deals go south. Oh, really? Huge percent of them is is you and I have talked about in the past. Procurement truly does need to endorse the deal for it to roll through in in most instances. Every now and then, yeah, I guess there's an argument you can go to your business stakeholder. Hey. You go talk to procurement and let them know just how darn bad you need this because of all the value. But from your experience, those little end runs don't don't typically

Dean Edwards: do it. I would tell you 90% of end runs end badly. Even if they result in a sale, the sale doesn't go that well post contract or anything else. And we tend to have a long memory in procurement if you've done an on this. So it's best to work cooperatively with us. And frankly, from the point of view of being effective as a salesperson, if I view you as a trusted resource, a trusted adviser, I'm going to listen much more to what you say. And you're going to have a greater ability to influence the supplier list, getting on that, the RFIs, the RFPs, the selection criteria, and even the process we use to buy something. And you don't have to be reacting to the procurement process.

Dean Edwards: If you're effective as a salesperson and can really establish a rapport, you can help influence it. And I find it very bemusing that more sales teams don't come in and actually help the procurement team through the procurement process and share with them things that they need to know or to be cognizant of in order to be effective. It tends to be more adversarial, and and you described the the table thumping, drive down the cost and everything else like that. If you've engaged earlier enough in the in the process, you can at least mitigate that, if not negate it and have a very different discussion. The other thing that people tend to fall victim of too and is something that your buying journey can help address, is not every requirement requires a competitive bid. Mhmm. And if you can demonstrate the value, if you can demonstrate why your costs are appropriate for what you're offering, there is the possibility that you don't have to go through a competitive bid. Competitive bids tend to be forced into organizations as a response to people acting improperly, albeit innocently, sometimes not.

Dean Edwards: And then that necessitates a reaction. Typically, audit or compliance become involved. And they're looking to set up processes or systems that will prevent that happening again. And everybody does that. And then, unfortunately, somebody else finds a way around the process. So we have to put another a convoluted process where you don't need to have one. If a convoluted process where you don't need to have one. If you can have a relationship that there is the trust there, where a category manager, sourcing manager can come to me as a chief procurement officer and say, I have an arrangement.

Dean Edwards: I know that my costs are competitive. I can demonstrate this. I can demonstrate the value we're going to get out of it. I don't think we need to go through the whole competitive process. In nearly every company I was at, I had the ability to approve that, and it grant an exception to the competitive bid process. Mhmm. And the value, which I could do that in some organizations, ran as high as $25,000,000 in expenditure. Wow.

Bruce Scheer: Okay. So the trust component, Dean, that you saw is quite critical in avoiding competitive bids, especially when the case was made, demonstrated that the pricing was right, you know, it's competitive and the value, of course, is there. And so with that great communication and good trust, then you could avoid the competitive bid process and save everybody a lot of time and anguish around that.

Dean Edwards: Totally. Now the bit where people mess up on that is where they convince the stakeholder that it's competitive, and they don't need to go out. And I've lost count of the amount of time stakeholders come to me and said, we have the best price possible. I was like, well, how do you know that? The supplier told us. It doesn't work. We need evidence. We need to be able to convince the rest of the organisation that we've done our due diligence and can really justify why that would be the case.

Bruce Scheer: Hey, Dean. I have a curiosity. This might be a left field type of question for you, but I've been in a debate with some people around, hey, humans buy on emotion, and then they justify with business value. They'll they'll they'll try to rationalize, but humans make decisions on emotion. And I was curious, does that the emotional decision making, does that flow into the procurement function? Or is that where the rational business case might take hold? Help me understand that. Just the emotional quotient or one of our folks, like, Mike likes to talk about is emotional contribution. You know, don't don't ignore it because it's huge. It's his argument versus how am I increasing revenue? How am I driving down costs? Or how am I reducing risk for the client? Make sure you don't ignore emotion because that's a huge component.

Bruce Scheer: I'm just curious your reaction to that that perspective.

Dean Edwards: It's a good left field question. I would tell you that procurement are not automatons. They have emotions. They have feelings. And like any other human being, there are certain people that they will trust, and other people they inherently do not trust, and that has an impact on things. But the whole structure and process around procurement category management and purchasing is devised to make sure that there's a robust business case at the end of the day. Where it comes into play is, do we trust what we're being told by certain suppliers, sales people, relative to their competition? And do we have a belief that they will actually come through for us? And there are people that I know I can trust take it to the bank and will be stand up all the way through. And I have a lot of time for those individuals, and they get a lot of time and respect from me in return.

Dean Edwards: There are others who view it as a short term relationship, nothing to invest in, act with disrespect towards the process and our role. And they tend to engender a negative reaction. And we're crafting the selection criteria. We're shaping the RFI, the RFP. And quite often, we're actually involved in scoring those as well. So it's not good business sense to get on the wrong side of procurement. So, yeah, there's an emotional element. We do as much as we can with the processes, the tools, the methodologies that we have to take that out for all parties. But I hate to break it to sales, we are human.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Well, no. And and that's a good thing. And back to just being credibility ready, what we talked about before, client ready. All these different readiness dimensions really would flow into being that trusted advisor with a capital t trust because you built a track record. You do your analysis. You present that well, and you just earn that right. And then when you deliver on it, of course, you get called up for the next opportunity that procurement might might even source for you.

Dean Edwards: Yeah. So let's build on that. This is the thing that I don't think is appreciated enough. Procurement looks across the whole of their company. They see the spend numbers. They understand who the budget holders are. They know who's using what, where, and how. And many times I've seen sales teams miss a bigger opportunity because they narrowed in on a project basis, rather than looking at what was going across the whole enterprise.

Dean Edwards: So engaging with procurement early on and saying, well, what else is out there? Can be hugely impactful. Just as much as post contract, if you do a good job, if you're working effectively with the organization, both sourcing and category management teams are likely to be open to what other opportunities exist for you. How can you expand your offering into our organization beyond the product and service we're actually using? So look at it in these terms. Within the product or service that's been presented, is there actually a bigger market than you're seeing as a salesperson? And then secondly, how can you expand the market overall with new products and services

Bruce Scheer: if you have a positive relationship with procurement? Absolutely. And I've witnessed that personally, Dean, just working with the procurement function at Alcatel Lucent, huge enterprise. Did so much work with them. But a lot of it was with my relationships with the business stakeholders. We're working on their particular issues or go to market issues that were requiring sales and marketing type of support for those initiatives to be successful. Over time, I fostered a relationship with procurement, and I would get calls saying, hey, Bruce. We're thinking about doing something like this. Would you be interested in exploring this with us and bidding on that eventually? And they'd invite me to the table, to that party, and early, luckily, not just where I'd be.

Bruce Scheer: Column Fodder, my company, that turned to anywhere. We need a credit to bid, so we need another column there. But no truly brought to the table because they're cooking something up and procurement's actually bird dogging that a little bit, trying to bring the right vendors to the table to see if they can move in that direction. Absolutely. Very cool. Well, Dean, this has been a rich, rich dialogue. Is there anything else you want us to know?

Dean Edwards: Yes. So one of the things that I would stress is there's a wealth of opportunity from engaging positively with procurement. You are going to encounter Rottweilers out there in the procurement world. People who are driven based on emotion, highly competitive. Sometimes that's real. Sometimes it's a bit of a pretense based on the situation people are in. It's incumbent on both procurement and sales to work more effectively together in the interests of both their companies. And I would really encourage people to do that.

Dean Edwards: We are working at Converge SPT on course materials about how to engage with procurement, how to shape the RFPs, how to influence the outcomes. Not in a Machiavellian way, but in a constructive fashion. Because I really believe sales can help procurement be more effective, and procurement can help sales be more impactful within their own organizations. That as low as I am in negotiation parlance to to say this, this is an example of a win win for both parties.

Bruce Scheer: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. No. And I'm excited to, promote your courses, across our community, our audiences. So I will do that, Dean. How can people interact with you and participate in that?

Dean Edwards: The best way is to come on to our website or contact me directly. Our website is www.convergespt.com. My email is dean.edwards@convergespt.com. Come register, sign up for our newsletter, sign up for our first course. It's a mini course on identifying different types of procurement teams. And we go into a lot more detail than we've been able to spend today, and guide you through what the strategies are for engaging with each different type of team and how you identify them. There is a much bigger course coming which delves more into the details of influencing skills, how to set up the RFPs, how to be an effective partner with procurement, as well as how do you deal with those organizations that are fundamentally adversarial. All the way through to how do you secure victory in the negotiations, get the right outcome? And then how do you establish barriers to competition coming in through effective working relationships with both procurement and the company?

Bruce Scheer: You bet. The other thing, Dean, that I love that you and I have talked about partnering on with with Value Pros is offering some of that pursuit team support as they're dealing with procurement. And there's a bit of a life cycle in how a pursuit team should partnering with procurement, getting in front of that early stage, then during all the negotiations, etcetera, and and then even beyond. So I just wanted to let everybody know that as well. You're available to support pursuit teams on their must win deals and helping them get through and with support of purchasing and and other stakeholders. You're a master of that. You know those perspectives and can help people get on point so they're successful.

Dean Edwards: Absolutely. That's the kind of thing I take a lot of enjoyment out of. And working with you guys has been tremendous. Huge wealth of knowledge and capability within valuepros.io. Huge amount of respect.

Bruce Scheer: Thank you, Dean. Thanks so much. Well, great episode, and thanks so much.

Dean Edwards: You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

Bruce Scheer: And that wraps up our enlightening conversation with Dean Edwards on how to be approval ready. We've uncovered the inner workings of procurement, explored the different types of procurement teams, and gained actionable strategies for building trust and demonstrating value. Remember, success in b to b sales isn't just about convincing your primary stakeholder. It's about navigating the entire approval process with Finesse. A big thank you to Dean for sharing his expertise with us in this episode. If you found this episode valuable, please share it with your colleagues and don't forget to subscribe to the ValuePros Show for more insights on mastering the art of value based selling. Until next time, this is Bruce Scheer reminding you to always lead with value.