In this, the third of our four-part blog series for the release of CPO Rising 2018: The Age of Intelligence, Kelly Barner of Buyers Meeting Point delves into the myriad facets of Procurement Performance in Chapter Three. There’s no debate that the importance and influence of procurement is on the rise across industries, but the question is, are procurement’s metrics – like spend under management – truly representative of those accomplishments?
Memorization is a frontage road: It runs parallel to the best parts of learning, never intersecting. It’s a detour around all the action, a way of knowing without learning, of answering without understanding.”
— Ben Orlin, “When Memorization Gets in the Way of Learning,” The Atlantic, 9 September 2013
Placing customer interests at the center of your strategic plan is wise, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy. Meeting customer expectations requires a full understanding their needs – and that is not possible unless you have one or more dedicated people who truly want to hear from customers and work with them to advance their objectives. As I found out in my conversation with Rose Lee of Determine, that’s precisely what a Chief Customer Officer does. And a whole lot more.
Last week, the team from Ardent Partners shared the results of their research: CPO Rising 2018: The Age of Intelligence in a webinar with Determine. This year’s report includes input from 324 participants, 62% of which are Director level, VP level, or C-level. No one industry accounted for more than 13% of the research data, although approximately 70% of the responses were from large (>$1B) companies in North America.
Just weeks after joining the Determine team as their Senior Vice President of Customer Success, Kevin Turner was in attendance at the annual user group conference in Laguna Beach. Between meeting customers for the first time and hearing their feedback through presentations and informal exchanges, it was a critical and well timed opportunity to ensure that the Determine product roadmap is aligned with a broad range of definitions for customer success.
March is what we used to call in Vermont one of the “shoulder seasons.” That is, it can’t decide whether to focus on winter or spring so it just throws curve balls at you all day. Luckily for us, as we cover in this March DetermiNews, Determine has incredible customers for us to focus on regardless of what the weather is doing. There are many pathways to achieving customer success; we’re success agnostic – whatever works for them works for us.
The world is mainly divided in two blocks in term of tax: the Value-Added-Tax, or VAT, that has been adopted by 166 countries out of 193 in the world; and the US, which is almost the only country that has sales tax. Some countries have still a very complex tax system that has not been […]
Unlocking the strategic value in contracts. A recent McKinsey study was chock-full of surprises in terms of procurement and CLM, including this little gem: Across industries, total procurement operating expenses are typically less than 1 percent of total spending. By underinvesting in this way, companies are overlooking a significant source of value: suboptimal contract terms […]
It’s not just about IQ, but EQ (Effectiveness Quotient). While intelligence is critical, a precise measure of procurement intelligence is less important than the performance it generates. .
Depending on who you ask, France was either a shoe-in or a long-shot to win the World Cup this month in Russia. Why they won is very well explained by this paraphrased excerpt from the New York Times: (The team) will be remembered for what it was: a team of exceptional talent and ruthless efficiency, […]
