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Don’t just have Your career doesn’t hinge on just having big ideas. They were able to build on that success to create a company-wide
great ideas: If you take a good idea and incubate it right, you initiative where procurement was assigned to sales people to help
Incubate them could have the recipe for real success. on strategic deals.
to succeed
An idea is nothing without execution. There are a lot of big Accountability on value
Gabe Perez ideas that sound great on paper but never go anywhere. And,
a lot of “small” ideas, when executed successfully, can turn into Too often in enterprise software, business cases were created to
VP, Strategy & Market Development, something much bigger. fund the purchase of software, but then organisations and software
Coupa Software vendors were never held accountable to delivering the promised
Conceive, Incubate, Execute results.
“Careers are made not by having big
ideas, but by being able to identify and The big idea in procurement right now is to elevate the The cloud delivery model gave organisations and vendors shared
execute on good ideas, big and small.” organisation based on value delivered. This is going to be the visibility into results. However, the mind shift toward a culture of
result of building a track record of executing initiatives that accountability around value hadn’t happened yet.
Love this article? support the company’s larger goals.
Share with your contacts via Procurious! At Coupa we started with a small aspect of value that we called
To build credibility, I’m a big fan of testing ideas quickly on Savings as a Service. We partnered with our customers to quantify
a smaller scale. A great way to incubate an idea is to find a the savings they achieved by deploying our service and were
department or stakeholder that could benefit from the value that eventually able to document over $8 billion in savings.
your idea could deliver, and see if they’ll work with you on a trial.
From there, we moved into our bigger vision of Value as a Service.
If it works, now you have a proof point. Results and value
delivered are the best way to overcome resistance when you are Focus on the outcome, find the idea
looking to execute a change to the status quo.
The problem with chasing big ideas is that they’re often too big to
Sharing the knowledge execute. The bigger and more complex the idea, the more reluctant
people are to jump on board.
I met a procurement professional whose idea was to help his
company speed up the sales cycle, something that’s strategically But don’t let that stop you. Start by delivering value on a small scale
important at most companies. His insight was that since and win over your champions.
procurement is always involved in negotiations, his team could
help the sales team understand the thinking of the procurement Careers are made not by having big ideas, but by being able to
teams on the opposite side of the table in sales negotiations. identify and execute on good ideas, big and small.
He brought that idea to sales leadership, and they agreed to a
trial where his team worked with sales executives on strategy
for a few deals. Sales saw immediate value in the form of less
resistance and faster time to close.
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