We had a little fun here at Next Level Purchasing recently when pursuing a new contract for our office supplies.<\/p>\n
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Of course, we like to think of ourselves as experts at sourcing due to the fact that we teach purchasing professionals in over 100 countries how to conduct sourcing. But we don\u2019t tell our competing vendors that \u2013 we play more of a \u201cmystery shopper\u201d role.<\/p>\n
During this particular sourcing process, we uncovered some interesting things that we\u2019ll be addressing in a multi-part series here on the Purchasing Certification Blog. Today, we\u2019ll focus on one \u201cdirty trick.\u201d For lack of an existing phrase, I\u2019ll call this the \u201cPhantom Leverage\u201d technique.<\/p>\n
The Phantom Leverage technique is when an office supply vendor establishes a relationship with an organization that has customers or members of its own. The organization then offers its customers or members a \u201cspecial discount\u201d with the office supply vendor.<\/p>\n
The intended perception this creates is that each customer or member is getting a better deal that it would be able to get on its own. After all, if you have the buying power of, say, 1,000 companies, it\u2019s only natural that you\u2019ll get a better deal, right?<\/p>\n
Not necessarily.<\/p>\n
Just like we found when sourcing health care benefits, it was relatively easy to get a better deal on our own. Actually, the office supply vendor who had this deal with a chamber of commerce that we belong to charged more<\/em> than we were currently paying for our supplies!<\/p>\n So beware of the Phantom Leverage trick. From what we\u2019ve seen, you rarely do better than what you\u2019d do on your own.<\/p>\n Is there time savings? Sure, but unless you work for the smallest of small companies, the time spent will have a return on investment.<\/p>\n While we\u2019ll be publishing Whitepaper Wednesday tomorrow, check back Thursday for the next installment in this series.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We had a little fun here at Next Level Purchasing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4136,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n