I hope that you have enjoyed the article “4 Vital Procurement Presentation Topics.”
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Communicating with executive management is a critical skill. Do it well, and the stature of your procurement department can increase dramatically. Do it poorly, and the procurement department will continue to get suboptimal respect from the boardroom.
In addition to the advice dispensed in the above-linked article, consider these other tips for communicating/presenting to executive management:
- Look for signs of agreement: nods, mmm-hmm’s, etc. – and then stop or continue on to another topic. Once you’ve convinced an executive of something, they don’t need to hear more on the topic. If you continue to attempt to convince them with one point of your presentation, you run the risk of annoying them, at one extreme, and compelling them to change their minds.
- Be direct in your answers. If an executive asks a yes or no question during your presentation and you answer with anything other than a yes or no, the executive will assume that you are telling him/her the answer they didn’t want to hear and may get mad that you appear to be trying to cover something up.
- Don’t make excuses. Sometimes you have to present bad news. Don’t make lame excuses. A good leader can smell a bad excuse a mile away. And good leaders hate bad excuses.
I have plenty of additional executive communication tips. But those are being saved for something special, coming soon from Next Level Purchasing. Stay tuned!
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