How to improve your influence skills with internal stakeholders
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HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR INFLUENCE WITH INTERNAL STAKEHOLDERS
People often forget that procurement professionals have to do as much selling as salespeople. Except in procurement, your buyers are internal stakeholders rather than external customers.
Learning how to influence stakeholders is an essential skill for procurement professionals. The ability to influence stakeholders enables you to have a positive impact on spend related activities within your organisation.
But where to begin on your journey to becoming an expert in internal stakeholder influence? Take a look at our tips for improving your influencing skills.
1. Identify key stakeholders and find common ground
A project can have many stakeholders. But each stakeholder will have different priorities and levels of interest in your project. Identifying key players enables you to focus your energy on individuals with the biggest impact in the long term.
It’s important to look at the bigger picture and assess which stakeholders will have the biggest impact. For example, a senior manager may have little interest in your project, but their buy-in may be significant. On the other hand, a junior team member may be very interested in upcoming projects with limited influence.
Make sure to align stakeholder interests with your own
By finding common ground and aligning expectations you can build trust. Building trust acts as a solid foundation for long-lasting stakeholder relationships. This, in turn, improves your stakeholder influence. It’s important to:
- Invite key stakeholders to exploratory conversations.
- Be transparent regarding the details of your proposals.
- Communicate frequently and openly with stakeholders.
- Understand that a stakeholder’s engagement in a project can change quickly.
Remember that you won’t be able to please everyone all of the time. But by ensuring that everyone is on the same page from the start, you can help your project run more smoothly.
2. Prove that you are a trustworthy source of advice
Not everyone may be willing to admit it, but most people love to buy. However, few people like feeling under pressure to buy. For procurement this means removing the perception that you are forcing stakeholders into a one-size-fits-all process.
To help combat this perception and win the trust of stakeholders, you need to make it obvious how and where you can help. Your personal PR is very important in this respect. For example, take a reflective look at your LinkedIn profile:
- How do you come across?
- Would people view you as a business person in a procurement role?
- Do you have an online voice?
- Do you make insightful comments on blogs and articles?
- Do you repost insights amongst your network?
You may think that these things only have surface importance. But the more visible your credentials are, the better your perception amongst relevant, local communities. This increased visibility is often the case both internally and externally.
3. Inspire fresh thinking amongst your stakeholders
By inspiring fresh thinking among stakeholders, you can accelerate your path to influence. Try taking the following steps to influence stakeholders:
Speak with key players face to face: If you have good examples of working together at the individual project level, schedule time with key internal stakeholders. Ask these stakeholders face to face to project their needs for the next 3-6 months. Having this information will enable you to establish how you can support them.
Stakeholders should be receptive to your understanding of their needs. However, if not, you know you have to do more to establish your partnering credentials in their eyes.
Hold a series of stakeholder engagement meetings with a focus on innovation: The second plan of action is to host a series of meetings with your regular suppliers:
- Focus the time on discussing new ways to innovate.
- Ask suppliers how they think they can improve the level of value they bring to your organisation.
- Proactively take these ideas to the internal stakeholders.
4. Be bold and confident when maintaining stakeholder relationships
Stakeholders often bring procurement professionals in at the eleventh hour. Additionally, these professionals frequently receive incomplete and unrealistic requirements.
Open communication channels and assertiveness is the only answer here. You need to be confident in your assessment of the situation and able to make stakeholders understand any issues. Believe it or not you may gain more credibility by confidently pushing back.
Being submissive and subservient will lose you the respect of stakeholders. This behaviour can also result in problems for your project down the line. After all, you wouldn’t accept this behaviour from a supplier and the same is true of a procurement professional.