The Other Side of the Table | What your CPO Wished you Knew

Send us Fan Mail Her account team turned over twice in twelve months. Implementation timelines slipped from six weeks to four months. The supplier's executive sponsor stopped showing up to QBRs. None of it was a fire on its own. Together it was the smoke. She filed the migration plan and waited. Procurement sees supplier financial trouble months before it hits the news. We see scope creep bef...

Send us Fan Mail The PO landed on her desk on the 28th. The contract had been signed three weeks earlier. The supplier had been picked four months before that. She was being asked to find budget for a decision that had been made without her, and to do it before close. By the time the purchase order is cut, every meaningful procurement decision has already been made. Supplier picked. Scope defined....

Send us Fan Mail Her analysis was clean. The numbers were right. The risks were real. Forty-eight hours later, the deal signed anyway. She was not wrong. She was right. And she lost. The frameworks aren't the hard part of procurement. The certifications aren't either. The hard part is the conversation in the office, behind the closed door, with someone who has more title than you, where...

Send us Fan Mail "Software is sold as a product. It's consumed as a project." Every enterprise software deal has a number on the contract and a much larger number on IT's calendar. The gap between the two is where most of the disappointment in enterprise software actually lives, and it's almost always invisible at the moment the organization says yes. In Episode 6, Robert...

Send us Fan Mail Last year, a deal I cared about almost died over a single clause. Ninety-three redlines came back from legal. The one that nearly ended the negotiation was about a risk that, in this specific engagement, would almost never materialize. Meanwhile, the thing that actually mattered, a data portability provision worth hundreds of thousands in future switching costs, went untouched. Th...

Send us Fan Mail "Earlier in my career, I reported two point four million dollars in procurement savings. Then my CFO asked me to show her where that number appeared on the balance sheet. She wasn't being dismissive. She was being precise. And the honest answer changed how I measure everything." In this episode, I break down why "savings" as procurement traditionally repor...

Send us Fan Mail You get a calendar invite at 4 PM. A supplier demo is tomorrow at 10. The supplier is already referencing conversations you weren't part of, and your stakeholder is nodding along like the deal is done. Sound familiar? In this episode, I break down what procurement is actually doing before we ever sit down at the table: the spend history reviews, the internal conversations wit...

Send us Fan Mail Last quarter, I turned down a million-dollar proposal. The supplier immediately sent a revised quote - fifteen percent lower. They still didn't understand why I said no. Price wasn't the problem. Price is almost never the problem .  In this episode, I walk through the five real reasons proposals die on a CPO's desk:  You didn't understand the problem - you pitc...

Send us Fan Mail A Head of Procurement shares what CEOs, CFOs, suppliers, and business leaders need to know about procurement, vendor/supplier management, contract negotiations, and organizational spending - straight from the other side of the table. Hosted by Robert Brindle, Head of Procurement at a major national nonprofit, The Other Side of the Table is a weekly business podcast that pulls back...