Quite often, purchasing departments are the bane of the salesperson. They’re often stressful, difficult to deal with, and seem contrary to the goals of the sales department. A purchasing department is basically a bureaucracy created with the sole purpose of thwarting quick decisions that can result in misspending on the company’s behalf. Many sales forces use the idea of “urgency” and fast pacing to make sales final in a short timeframe. This has many short-term benefits for the salesperson, including less likelihood that there will be haggling over price.
For long-term sales, however, the “urgency” method is often counter productive. For the purchasing party, urgency-led buys are often not good for the bottom line. So purchasing departments are created to make a bureaucratic buffer to prevent this. For the salesperson, this can, however, mean that dealing with the purchasing department becomes a tedious back-and-forth of agreements and paperwork before the sale is finalized. Even if the purchasing party is convinced to buy.
Most often, it should be noted, the purchasing decision is not made by the purchasing department, but is instead made by whomever your salesperson or team has been dealing with to make the sale. This decision maker might be a C-level or higher executive or the end user for the product you’re selling.
Contrary to popular belief amongst many salespeople, though, purchasing departments do not exist solely to make the salesperson’s job more difficult. Many sales departments create their own sub-departments just to deal with purchasing. The idea is simple: once the sale is final in the eyes of the buyer, the salesperson hands off the “grind” of dealing with the purchasing department to someone else, who goes through the bureaucratic process to actually finish the deal. This can be effective if your sales department has the manpower required to do this or has an internship or sales recruiting system that brings in “underlings” who can work this job effectively as they learn to move up the ladder.
They key to dealing with a purchasing department that becomes relentless in price-gouging is to emphasize quality, downplay discounts, and be sure that the final decision maker (who’s rarely in the purchasing department) has clear say.
Use confidence when countering offers or refusing price reductions. It might seem contrary to making a sale, but with a purchasing department’s agent, it usually works. They are likely required to buy your product by the time you’re dealing with them, so any negotiation they’re making is on soft footing.
In short, dealing with a purchasing department is not really difficult once you realize where their place is within the company as a whole.