In procurement, some categories of goods and services are easy to compare.\u00a0 What you get from one supplier may not be much different than what you\u2019d get from another supplier.\u00a0 In those types of categories, your results will be similar, regardless of which product, service or supplier you choose.\u00a0 You almost can\u2019t lose.<\/p>\n
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Other categories are characterized by more differentiation between suppliers.\u00a0 Quality, speed, cost, service, innovation, and social responsibility can vary tremendously between suppliers.\u00a0 And the business results you can reap from your purchase of those categories will vary as well.<\/p>\n
Online procurement training\u00a0is one of the latter categories with significant differences between suppliers.\u00a0 Because it is a category that procurement leaders only buy once every few years, most procurement leaders do not know where to start in trying to understand what those differences are.\u00a0 This series is here to help you identify all of the various factors that you should evaluate when making online procurement training decisions.<\/p>\n
The first factor that we\u2019ll cover is Quality<\/b>\u2026<\/p>\n
Think about some of the people that you know who have negotiation as one of their job responsibilities.\u00a0 Chances are, most of them would individually claim to be a good negotiator, right?<\/p>\n
But are each of those negotiators equally as good?<\/p>\n
Probably not.\u00a0 And I bet you can identify two of those negotiators that are the furthest apart:\u00a0 one who really is good and one who only thinks<\/i> he is good.\u00a0 Again, though, both of them will say that they are good negotiators.<\/p>\n
Such is the case with negotiation training.\u00a0 Some of the offerings will be great and really teach your procurement staff some useful tactics and techniques, and some of them\u2026well, won\u2019t.<\/p>\n
For example, I am looking at negotiation training material from two providers as a type this.\u00a0 Both suggest using open-ended questions in a negotiation.\u00a0 However, one provider includes a multitude of examples of such questions.\u00a0 The other does not.\u00a0 Which of the two would you consider to be higher quality negotiation training material?<\/p>\n
While this one example may seem trivial, imagine eight hours of training where one provider offers no examples and the other offers plenty of examples.\u00a0 You can imagine that, if there were two students each participating in this training with a different provider, there will be quite a difference in the post-training performance of those two students!<\/p>\n
The bottom line is that quality must be part of your evaluation of online procurement training options.\u00a0 There are many ways to assess quality ranging from reviewing public one-to-five-star ratings to actually getting to sample the material itself.<\/p>\n
Never assume that because two providers offer training on the same topic that your team will receive equal benefit regardless of the supplier.<\/p>\n
Stay tuned to this series as I cover more ways you should be comparing online procurement training providers.<\/p>\n
Disclosure:\u00a0 I am the founder of an organization that offers online procurement training.\u00a0 However, in this series, I will not mention the name of my company nor the names of any competitors.\u00a0 I will keep this totally general and vendor-agnostic so that you can get the benefit of one perspective on evaluating online procurement training without getting a sales pitch touting a specific provider.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In procurement, some categories of goods and services are easy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":4126,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-procurement"],"yoast_head":"\n