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Twelve Tips for Presenting to a Procurement Audience

As we are in the midst of the late spring conference season, I thought I would re-visit and update an article I wrote some years ago for the Spend Matters website. This is aimed primarily at solution providers who are speaking to a procurement audience, rather than procurement practitioners who might be speaking, although much of the advice is still applicable.

My definition of a “successsful” session is that the presenter gets across whatever message they aim to communicate, be that education, information, or a sales proposition, and the audience finds it worthwhile, ideally in terms of both enjoyment and usefulness in some sense.  Some direct or indirect leads resulting from the session would be even better. So here are my suggestions, based on my many hours of enjoyment and probably an equal amount of suffering at these events.

  1. The procurement audience is not really interested in the history of your business (unless it is REALLY fascinating), how many factories or offices you have around the world (particularly if you are speaking to managers who only operate in one city), or even the detail of your latest financial results. We will check out those things if and when we start to work with you.
  2. So keep the general background on the firm brief – when it was founded, approximately how big it is, what you do. Two minutes. The same applies to you personally. Two or three sentences about your background is enough. I’ve seen speakers spend half of their valuable time giving background that I guarantee no-one in the audience cares about.
  3. The audience does understand that you are there to promote your own firm, so don’t feel shy about doing so. But there are ways of making that interesting for the audience.  Detailed product / service descriptions are rarely a good use of time. Similarly, actual demos (of software for instance) often lose much of the audience and can easily go wrong. A few screen shots can be useful though.  If you have an exhibition stand at the event, you can offer to show delegates the product there.
  4. Think of the presentation in a similar way to the wider sales process. What is the problem or issue that the target audience is facing, and how does your offering help to solve that? Describe the issue, put it in context, explain why it matters, then outline how you can help. A little bit of looking to the future can be included and adds interest – “our new product, out later this year, will do this even better…”
  5. Don’t be afraid of making direct comparisons with your competition – but be honest of course. Even if a procurement executive sees the need, they will be wondering why they should buy your product and not someone else’s.  Don’t criticise the competition too directly, but feel free to say, “our product does this and this which no other competitor can provide”.  And there is nothing wrong with saying “we also have the lowest cost product on the market” if that is one of your selling points!
  6. If you work with many organisations on the buy side, you have an overview that each buyer may not have individually. That puts you in a good position to talk about broader issues, or the best practice you have observed, or provide “war stories” about positive or indeed negative things you have seen. Often, speakers only get into this when it comes to the questions, but that broader view can bring insight to the audience during the presentation.
  7. Surveys, reports and similar that your organisation has done or contributed to can provide interesting content – but be careful of the “so what” factor. The number of times I’ve heard a speaker saying “43% of procurement directors say they don’t have the right technology…”  Well yes, but so what? Check that anything of that nature is relevant to your message and genuinely interesting to the audience.
  8. The question and answer session should be key. Debate is good, you can reinforce some of your key points, and even find out if you have interested prospects in the audience. So leave enough time. In a 30-minute session, I suggest 5 minutes for the introduction (you will inevitably start 2 or 3 minutes late), 15 minutes of core content and 10 minutes for Q&A. Have a question you can put to the audience in case no-one volunteers – “I mentioned the issues with managing stakeholders in the health service –  has anyone found a good way of involving senior clinicians in these decisions”?
  9. Humour is fine if you can pull it off, but obviously be careful! Getting some involvement or reaction from for the audience early on is another tactic which increases participation and focus (personally, I find it also relaxes me as a speaker). If you don’t have a joke (a mildly amusing remark about something in the news can often work), maybe ask a question just to get some early engagement, relevant to your topic of course. “How many people here have sustainability as a key objective this year”? 
  10. Do a timed run through (even if it means talking to yourself on the train on the way to the event) to check the timing. There is nothing more frustrating than a speaker who says, “I’ve only got a few slides, I’ll speak for 10 minutes then we can have a good discussion” and then waffles on for half an hour.  Running out of time is amateurish and speaks of a lack or regard for the audience.
  11. Any slide that is on the screen for less than a minute or so is usually worthless (unless it is a clever, quick visual joke or something similar!) Equally, a slide with so much content packed onto it – words, charts, tables, diagrams – that no-one beyond the first row can read it is a waste of time too. If you have anything of a complex nature that you really want to communicate, put it on a hand-out. It is a personal thing, but I would tend to use between 8 and 10 slides for a 15-minute session. Trying to fit 30 slides into 15 minutes rarely works well.  Not using slides is fine too, but you need to be a really good and confident speaker to pull that off.
  12. Presenting does not come easy for everyone. But do try and bring some energy and enthusiasm to the session. You are in effect entertaining the audience as well as imparting something useful. If you look or sound like you don’t want to be here with us, or it is clear that you haven’t put much effort into the session, why should the audience bother listening or engaging?

If you have thought clearly about your session, prepared and rehearsed well, you will feel better and more confident. And that means the audience will have a better experience too. Good luck!

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Huge Ship, Tiny Error, Major Problem

Picture: LPhot Alex Ceolin, UK MOD© Crown copyright 2019

You may know the expression “don’t spoil the ship for a ha’pworth of tar*”, but we have a case now where the ship most certainly has been spoiled – or at least put out of service for some considerable time – because of a tiny error in manufacturing. The impact of this has also led to a tricky contract management situation.

In August 2022, the British aircraft carrier Prince of Wales broke down just one day after departing its Portsmouth base for training exercises off the US coast. That was hugely embarrassing for the Navy given the ship had cost some £3.1 billion and this wasn’t the first problem since initial launch in 2019. This time, the issue was traced to a starboard propeller shaft fault and an installation error. Responding to a recent parliamentary question, Ben Wallace, the UK Defence Minister, said that based on “initial reports” the shaft was misaligned by 0.8 – 1 millimetre. That is a tiny mistake, but apparently caused a huge problem.

As well as the operational issues this caused, the question of who should pay for the error is also complex. Construction and delivery of the warship was carried out by a consortium of three firms under the banner of the now defunct Aircraft Carrier Alliance. BAE Systems, Babcock and Thales were all involved, which makes it complex to assess liability. Will the Ministry of Defence (MOD) end up paying or will they be able to pin the responsibility onto one or more of the firms?

A report on the “Breaking Defence” website said that the MOD “declined to comment on why the repair bill liability decision has not been made yet, nor when a decision is likely to be made”.  But MOD did say that repairs were likely to cost some £25 million, and that an investigation was looking at how to ensure the failure was not repeated. Well yes, one would hope that the same won’t happen again!

John Healey, the Labour Party’s shadow defence secretary pointed out that since the ship entered service in December 2019, it had spent 411 days in dock for repairs, compared to just 267 days at sea. A previous deployment also ended in embarrassment and a quick return to base in Portsmouth after an internal flood left the engine room and electrical cabinets submerged for 24 hours. The current repairs were supposed to be completed at the Rosyth dockyard in Scotland by February, but at time of writing (May 2023) still seem to be going on.

We could draw analogies here between our (literal) flagship and the wider state of the UK. Still pretending to be a significant global power, but incapable of actually doing anything to live up to that fantasy and all that sort of thing. But keeping to the facts, in a more mundane fashion it does highlight the importance of absolute clarity in the contract whenever you are buying from a consortium of any kind – and that doesn’t just apply in the military world of course.

Don’t assume a consortium will act as one entity if something goes wrong. It’s just as likely that each party will fight to protect their own position, which can leave the buyer in a difficult position, as we may be seeing here. So a strong and clearly written contract, including a definition of what will happen if there are issues after the formal consortium is dissolved, is essential.

And you can see why the UK Treasury (finance ministry) is not too keen on increasing the MOD’s budget for spending on more equipment, even given the present Russian threat. Cases like this (as well as high-profile failures such as the Ajax armoured vehicles) all add to a lack of confidence that such money would be spent well.

* A bit of research suggests that the expression was originally about sheep rather than ships! I didn’t know that…

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TSB Systems and Contracting Failure- CIO Fined

In my Bad Buying book, I wrote about the IT disaster that affected millions of TSB bank customers back in 2018. Here is the story from the book.

“In 2015 Sabatell acquired TSB, a UK-based retail bank, formally part of the Lloyds TSB Group. TSB at some point needed to move onto its own IT platform, rather than continuing to use the Lloyds  group systems, as they were now competitors to their former parent company. But the move, in April 2018, turned into a disaster.

Account holders couldn’t use mobile or Internet banking, and some reported seeing accounts details from other account holders. Customers struggled for weeks to make mortgage and business payments, as the new TSB systems failed to function properly. The issue was serious enough to be raised in the British Parliament, and in September 2018 TSB’s CEO, Paul Pester, resigned.

In March 2019 The Sunday Times reported that an investigation into the affair put much of the blame onto the IT firm that handled the transition.13 However, the twist was that this firm was SABIS – which is part of the Sabatell Group itself. So although it has a separate identity, this was in effect the internal IT function of the group that owned TSB.

Reports suggested a range of technical and programme management issues around the deployment of new software, rather than problems with the underlying infrastructure. But whatever the cause, the whole episode cost TSB £330 million,14 and there is a  ‘provisional agreement’ (according to the firm’s annual report) for SABIS to pay TSB £153 million. In November 2019 an independent report from law firm Slaughter and May concluded that the issues arose because ‘the new platform was not ready to support TSB’s full customer base’ and, second, ‘SABIS was not ready to operate the new platform’.

Questions have to be asked about the choice of ‘supplier’ here. Was SABIS the right choice to carry out this challenging task? It certainly doesn’t appear so, in retrospect. Did TSB have a choice, or was the firm told by top Sabatell management that it had to use SABIS? Would a firm with a wider and broader experience of banking systems than SABIS have done better? And why didn’t TSB accept the offer of help from Lloyds, which was made as soon as news of the problems broke?”

Now, five years later, there is an interesting postscript. Carlos Abarca, who was the TSB chief information officer, has been fined £81,620 by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA), the body that provides oversight of the UK banking system. In their 35 page report, they explain how Abarca’s failure caused a debacle that might have threatened financial stability more widely.

He apparently ignored early signs that the migration was not going well before the big switchover. He “did not ensure that TSB formally reassessed Sabis’s ability and capacity to deliver the migration on an ongoing basis”. Sabis told Abarca that they were migration ready and that subcontractors had given written confirmation that their infrastructure was fit for purpose. but the Authority felt this was not enough because the statements were caveated with comments about outstanding tasks. Abarca also did not obtain a written updated confirmation of readiness from Sabis when he told his own Board everything was ready for the transition.

The PRA said, “Mr Abarca’s failings undermined TSB’s operational resilience and contributed to the significant disruption TSB experienced to the provision of critical functions and potentially impacting on financial stability”.

This might be the first time a senior executive has been fined and disgraced for a failure in contract and project management. Now clearly in most industries, there is no equivalent of the PRA to  carry out this sort of investigation and take such action if someone screws up in a similar manner. But if you are in the financial services industry in the UK, it is a warning. If you are responsible in some way for operations, and that includes some procurement and contract management activities, then you must be very careful and must conduct your work with considerable diligence. And make sure you cover your back carefully at every point if a supplier tells you, “yes, everything is fine, don’t worry”!

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An Interesting Fraud – – Maybe Bad Supplying Rather then Bad Buying?

There are a number of very common procurement frauds; well covered of course in the Bad Buying book.  “Inside jobs” based around a corrupt employee take a number of forms but often consist of someone internal diverting spend to fake companies that they control or have a stake in, or to companies that are paying them a bribe. Fraud from outsiders often means submission of fake invoices, or diverting invoice payments away from genuine suppliers to the fraudster.  However, most frauds could be prevented by some sensible and standard policies and processes.   

So having collected examples of fraud and corruption in a fairly serious manner for over a decade now, it is rare for me to see a new variant. But a recent case in the US was quite unusual, in that it was based on buyer impersonation, which we don’t see very often. I’m sure it has happened before, but this was certainly not a common or garden case. Indeed, it was quite impressive in a way, with the fraudster showing impressive attention to detail, and a good understanding of how procurement works. And the failing was not actually with procurement policy or people; it was the suppliers who were conned and whose processes let them down.

Fatade Idowu Olamilekan,  a citizen of Nigeria, was extradited from Nigeria to the US (with good cooperation between the authorities in each county) and recently sentenced to five years in prison in the US in connection with a scheme to fraudulently obtain and attempt to obtain millions of dollars.

From 2018 to 2020 he obtained details of various procurement executives in the US government sector. In particular, during the pandemic, he impersonated the Chief Procurement Officer of New York State to fraudulently obtain medical equipment, including defibrillators.  He set up email addresses that were as close as possible to the correct ones for the relevant people and organisations. He then contacted suppliers, principally those already working with New York, and said he was looking for quotes for items.

After they submitted quotes, he told the suppliers that they had been successful and won the contract, and issued them with fake purchase orders (POs). The goods were to be delivered to warehouses that he nominated, and from there he shipped them to locations in the UK, Australia and Nigeria.  The payment terms on the POs was 30 days, which is pretty standard, so didn’t raise any alarms. But of course that gave him 30 days to move the goods somewhere else once they were delivered, before the supplier started looking for their money. Presumably, when their cash didn’t arrive, the supplying firm eventually got through to the real buyer, who would then explain that they knew nothing about this order.

All very clever, although getting goods rather than direct cash via a fraud leaves you with the problem of disposing of the stolen goods. Criminals rarely get anything like the real value of their ill-gotten gains (so the bloke in the pub trying to flog me a laptop said).  So that’s a downside of this type of activity. 

Whilst this wasn’t really a very hi-tech fraud, it does raise some interesting questions as we move into the AI world.  A single phone call from the supplier and conversation with a real procurement manager from New York would have put an end to this within minutes.  So as transactions and even sourcing processes become more and more automated, you can imagine a situation where a clever fraudster uses a fake AI bot to place orders, which will then be processed by the suppliers’ AI powered bots. How long would it be before the supplier bot realises it has been conned?

This is not something I’ve thought about too much, but as we enter the ChatGPT era, there’s going to be a whole new world of Bad Buying fraud and corruption to think about and look out for!

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Local Government Elections – Can We Stop Corruption and Incompetence?

We have local council elections in England on Thursday this week (May 4th). According to the opinion polls, the Conservatives may lose one thousand seats to Labour and (in areas like Surrey where we live), the Lib Dems.  Of course, as a mere procurement author and commentator, I wouldn’t dream of suggesting how you should vote. I mean, if you think we have seen growing prosperity in recent years, improving public services, clear rivers and lakes, a great train service, a ruling cadre that deeply cares about the people… you should vote accordingly.

Personally, I would like to see more councils where there is no single party in control, or at least where the control does and can change over the years. Where the same party rules for decades on end, complacency can set in, or elected councillors can even start behaving in an unethical or criminal manner.

We’ve seen some extreme cases of this in recent years. It is not just one political party behind these disasters either – it was Labour led councils that failed in places including Slough, Liverpool and Croydon, and the Tories in Thurrock, Woking and Northamptonshire. But they have all presided over financial disasters, with gross incompetence always a factor and accompanying fraud in some cases. 

Certainly one common thread is the secrecy, lack of openness and transparency that we see in the behaviour of the councils. My own local council, Surrey Heath, is not quite a disaster on the scale of some of these others, but the Tory council made an extremely misjudged investment in commercial property in Camberley town centre, buying right at the peak of the market. In terms of asset value, that has cost the local taxpayer over £50 million and counting. But the deals were stitched up by a very small cabal of councillors and executives – not even all the Tories in council knew what was going on. Hopefully, the Lib Dems will win here this week, then at least we might get to see the full accounts and the full story behind what went on.

In the case of Thurrock, it was brilliant work by journalist Gareth Davies that exposed the huge and very “strange” investments that may end up costing the taxpayer £500 million in real cash losses. Again, there was no transparency and councillors refused to disclose information for year, even after Freedom of Information requests. (I will be astonished if no-one ends up in court over this case).

Many of the cases involve “bad buying” in a conventional procurement sense too. That was certainly true in Croydon, where construction and refurbishment contracts were part of the story – that is another case where we don’t know yet if the driver was fraud, incompetence or both.  In other examples, it is dodgy investments (which is “buying” of a sort, I suppose), and we also see ridiculously extravagant payoffs to top executives too.

At the end of 2022, Labour published their plan for greater devolution of power. If Labour win the next election, the government will devolve more budget and control to local councils and mayors. I’m all for that in theory, but given what we have seen in the last few years, it also makes me nervous.  If Keir Starmer really wants to do that, he must put in place some checks and balances to make sure we don’t just see more Croydons and Thurrocks, but with even bigger sums of money.

Transparency needs to be addressed, public scrutiny should be made easier, and there should be a strengthened audit regime for councils. But the problem with audit is it is after the event when the money is already gone! So maybe there should be some sort of pre-expenditure check for projects, investments or contracts over a certain amount?  Perhaps a reincarnated Audit Commission could fulfil that role? Anyway, just throwing more money and power at some of the incompetent and /or crooked muppets we have seen around local government in recent years does not seem sensible.

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