These are 3 disruptive procurement practices (Not easily palatable for risk-averse CPOs) to increase the output from your precious consulting dollars!
1.) Ready for this? Insource and Pay:
If your consulting requirement is getting external insights and benchmarking, you can hire consultants. But, if your requirement is low-medium complexity optimisations, internal assessments, and fixing things internally, you can advertise such projects first on an Internal Marketplace (have I given you a hint on Supernegotiate's next module here? Yes, launching it in Nov/Dec).Let your internal employees (I call them Intrapreneurs) fix it for you. Most importantly, be ready to pay them, similar to what you were prepared to spend externally!You would be surprised to discover the vast amount of skillsets available cross-functionally and, surprisingly, a lot more available bandwidth across your organisation than you thought!
2.) For External Consulting Assignments, Focus on Actions:
First and Most importantly, Ask your consultants not to give you pretty presentations (I dont have a softer word to use). People look for pretty presentations because they want to re-use for their own presentations (and save time). Rather, ask them to focus on the quality of recommended actions (and not the quantum of information). Goodbye, 20+ slides of presentations!
3.) Outcome-based Payouts and not just recommendations:
You may not admit it, but most of the external consulting assignments lack execution and often end up as slide decks. I call them "expensive presentations". No offence to consulting firms. Some of the recommendations are insightful and logical, but without having skin in the game from consulting firms to back up the benefits of recommendations, everything remains a utopia. Recommendations are easy to make, but Execution is a gold mine and hard to master. So, restructure your consulting contracts and make at least 50% recommendation and 50% outcome-based! Be ready to reward the consultants if they actually get you more benefits than promised. Pain-Gain share!
More on this later, via a video coming out Sunday!#Supernegotiate #SuperCoe
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