Are you a ‘pragmatist in pain’?

Why procurement teams put up with broken sourcing processes for too long

Article orginally published on LinkedIn

If you work in procurement, you probably didn’t enter the profession to lose hours every week chasing suppliers over email, copying and pasting data across massive Excel sheets, or manually verifying compliance certifications.

Yet, for many category managers and sourcing leads, this is daily reality. Business author and advisor Geoffrey Moore, describes this kind of operational pain as “mind-numbing, demoralising, tiring, and budget-sucking!”

This article was inspired by the work of Moore on technology adoption, and particularly by this recent interview, which got me thinking about what a ‘pragmatist in pain’ looks like in procurement.

Maybe you don’t have dedicated sourcing technology. Or perhaps you do, but it’s difficult to use or poorly adopted.

Either way, Excel becomes part sourcing tool, part database. Email becomes your supplier communication system. You fill in the gaps through experience and workarounds.

The problem comes when you’re spending more time managing the workaround than doing the sourcing. If this is you… read on.

Am I a ‘pragmatist in pain’?

First, a quick explanation for context. In Crossing the Chasm, Moore groups buyers by how readily they adopt new technology: 

• technologists are drawn to what’s new, 
• early adopters are willing to back a promising idea, 
• the early majority are pragmatists who want proof before they move, 
• the late majority are more cautious still, 
• and laggards resist change for as long as possible. 

Pragmatists sit right in the middle. They’re not against new technology, but they need to see that it works, that others like them have succeeded with it, and that the risk of changing is lower than the pain of staying put.

Moore uses the term ‘pragmatists in pain’ to describe a point where the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the perceived risk of changing.

If you’re a pragmatist, you’re unlikely to be interested in new technology simply because it’s new. You want evidence, peer proof and a clear reason to change something that, however imperfectly, still works.

You’ve got savings targets to meet and stakeholders expecting support. Changing a familiar process introduces another thing that can go wrong. So you put up with friction. You build another spreadsheet or use your incumbent platform for the parts that work and manage the rest outside it.

There may be history behind that reluctance too. Perhaps a previous implementation dragged on, adoption disappointed or the promised ROI never appeared. Once you’ve been through that, another technology proposal is a harder sell.

Eventually, though, the balance changes. Your existing process becomes so awkward or labour-intensive that trying something different starts to feel like the safer option. This is your ‘pragmatist in pain’ moment.

Where is your work getting stuck?

Moore has also written about ‘trapped value’ which is work or expertise that an organisation can’t fully use because of the way its processes operate.

Maybe you’re rebuilding a tender from last year’s spreadsheet. Perhaps a supplier sends a revised response just before the deadline. Five stakeholders return five scoring sheets, and you’re the person combining them.

Individually, these tasks can seem minor but together, they eat into your week.

Every hour you spend keeping an administrative process moving is an hour you can’t spend on category strategy, supplier relationships or commercial work. And if you’re being asked to contribute more strategically, that matters.

Start with the part that hurts

You don’t necessarily need an organisation-wide transformation programme to fix this.

Start with the sourcing problem creating the most friction. Maybe it’s a repetitive RFQ, a complex RFP involving several stakeholders, or an existing platform so difficult that parts of the process have quietly moved back into spreadsheets.

Use that as your test case and ask yourself, “Can I run this event better than I run it today?”

Then test the case for change. Does the technology solve the problem you have now? Can you prove value before making a large commitment? Will people actually use it?

Run a real event and measure the time, effort and commercial result. If the approved route is harder than the workaround, people will eventually choose the workaround.

Two starting points, one sourcing problem

You might be starting from scratch or you might already have sourcing technology that isn’t doing what you need it to do. These Market Dojo customer stories show both sides.

CommerceHub: starting without sourcing software

CommerceHub had no sourcing platform in place. Its formal RFP process relied heavily on spreadsheets and email, and the procurement team consisted of just two people.

Within 24 hours of buying its Market Dojo licence, CommerceHub had its first RFP running. It launched externally within another 24 hours and later reported savings of 30–40% across the RFPs in the case study.

If you’re starting without dedicated sourcing technology, that’s a useful model to follow. In other words, take one real process, run it differently and measure what changes.

Imperial Brands: when you already have the technology

Imperial Brands already had an enterprise Source-to-Contract platform from a ‘top-right quadrant’ provider.

But adoption was poor, workflows created inefficiencies, reporting was difficult and sourcing adoption sat at around 25%, with fewer than 200 eRFx events being run each year.

Market Dojo was implemented for 83 users across nine regions in less than six weeks. Since then, sourcing events have increased fivefold and Imperial Brands reports an ROI of more than 6,000%. Of users surveyed after training, 95% rated the new solution “better” or “much better” than the previous platform.

If you already have procurement technology, the lesson is different. Owning a platform doesn’t mean you have to keep forcing your sourcing process through it when poor adoption or cumbersome workflows are getting in the way. Read the Imperial Brands case study.

Find your first bowling pin

Returning to Moore, pragmatists can approach change using the idea of the ‘head bowling pin’. Instead of attempting a risky, company-wide rollout, focus 100% of your resources on solving a single, highly painful operational bottleneck for one specific team. Completely curing this local frustration creates a highly visible, referenceable success story that naturally wins over adjacent departments.

You can take the same approach.

Find the event you dread running, the category consuming too much administration or the stakeholder group struggling with your incumbent platform.

Run one event differently and measure what happens. Did it take less time? Did suppliers engage? Was there a commercial improvement? Did stakeholders find it easier?

Those answers are far more useful than another theoretical technology business case because they show what actually happened in your organisation. If the result is good, you’ve got a much stronger case for doing it again.

Why on-demand sourcing suits a pragmatist

Large procurement technology projects can require a lot of commitment before you’ve had much chance to see the benefit. Licences, implementation, integration and training can all come first. 

On-demand sourcing gives you another route. You can start with the requirement in front of you, use the technology on that event and judge the result before deciding how far you want to take it.

That flexibility is an important part of Market Dojo’s approach, from on-demand sourcing for immediate needs to more structured programmes for larger organisations undertaking wider digital transformation.

If you’re starting from spreadsheets and email, you can improve sourcing without turning it into a major technology project. If you already have a procurement platform, you can use Market Dojo where the incumbent system is cumbersome, poorly adopted or doesn’t suit the sourcing requirement.

The Market Dojo Sandpit also lets you experience both the host and supplier sides of the platform before you run anything live.

Summary

You don’t need to replace a spreadsheet simply because it’s a spreadsheet. And you don’t need to abandon an existing procurement platform because something newer has appeared.

Ask yourself whether your current process still works well enough.

If you’re spending more and more time compensating for difficult technology, fragmented processes and manual workarounds, there comes a point where doing nothing stops being the cautious choice.

Find the sourcing problem causing you the most friction. Run it a better way. See what happens.

You might also like to read Why maverick spend is a warning sign of poor platform adoption

Want to put the approach to the test?

Book a tailored demo, or use the Sourcing Sandpit to experience the process from both the host and supplier perspective.