Procurement must enhance their soft skills to increase their influence

Join the podcast to hear from CIPS and Tim Jenkins and Ian Castle from Wheelspinner. Tim’s career background was in sales as a Sales Director and now works with procurement teams to help them understand how they are being sold too and has delivered some skills courses for CIPS. Ian works also works at WheelSpinner and has a wealth of experience in helping procurement to understand how to buy professional services and what pitfalls to watch out for. Thank you both for joining me today.

Soft skills, with emphasis on influencing skills at senior levels are very important for professionals and we continually see that these skills need to be enhanced as the complex demands placed on procurement increase. However, the 2020 CIPS/Hays Salary Guide reports that procurement being seen as a strategic partner to the business is still a challenge in 2020, influencing suppliers is often the easier part of the process so how can procurement better communicate, influence, engage stakeholders, change mind-sets and lead change in their organisations? Is the answer to become more salesy?

With this in mind, Tim, Ian and CIPS discuss techniques of how procurement can look at how storytelling can help with engagement and the importance of soft skills plus techniques of how to fine tune your communication skills.