One of our best tools for dealing with Procurement is often found right in front of our eyes, or sitting right next to us. It is our own team. How can they help? Often, Procurement tries to keep us from infiltrating the organization and making contacts that can help us generate support and gain information. If we as salespeople are blocked, what about the other people on our team? Are they blocked too?

Recently in a meeting with a client's general management team, the topic of networking came up. It happens that their sales team has most of their relationships "inside the box" - the department they are "supposed to sell to", and they need to break out. The Human Resources Director mentioned that she could help with the sales team's networking efforts. She said that she knows a lot of HR people in their customers and prospects, and has a good rapport with them, as they routinely share HR related strategies and ideas. The IT Director chimed in as well, and talked about how he is in a number of professional associations with IT leaders from his geographical area, and that he had a number of contacts he could tap on behalf of the sales team. Then the Marketing leader chimed in with some of his ideas.

Of course, there is our senior management team, who always somehow seem to be so well connected with their counterparts in other organizations. As an added bonus, using our senior managers to contact the prospect's senior managers takes the heat off of us. After all, it's not our fault that our executives want to meet with their executives, right?

In many cases, the members of our team are more than happy to help us, and we need to ask them. After all, we're all in this together.