Madison Mobley's blog

An Open Letter to Procurement Sales People Who Want Their Products Bought

Best in class procurement people are astute in finance, law, analytics, project management, sales, negotiation, ethics, executive address, total cost of ownership, and return on investment.

SIG University Certified Sourcing Professional (CSP) program graduate Madison Mobley discusses how to articulate value by utilizing hard savings, soft savings, and cost avoidance.


My first corporate job out of college was with EMC Corporation, now Dell EMC, notorious for its Sales Associate Bootcamp.

Picture seven weeks in a basement without food and water (tee hee, dead serious), and an exam every couple of days, 90% or higher to pass… Delicious.

The result? I learned how to talk technology very well – the bits, the bytes, the speeds, the feeds. And, at a time when the information age called for CIOs to reimagine how their company’s data was to be stored and protected, nothing was sexier than a storage array with fibre channel connectivity and two-factor authentication.

What’s more, I learned who best to engage at the individual contributor, mid-level management, and executive leadership levels. It was the same person(s) at every organization I prospected into 99.999% of the time for what I was selling.

Long preface short, knowing your product, knowing your ICP (ideal customer persona) and articulating that knowledge in your prospect’s “love language” made for a successful salesperson back then.

Fast forward to March 2020.

The day I joined Fairmarkit, the intelligent sourcing platform that revolutionized how all organizations buy the stuff they need (it doesn’t matter what the stuff is), I felt confident stepping into a sales role.

True, I had never sold directly to procurement people, but how different could it be?

The answer? Way different.

Madison L. Mobley, Senior Account Executive, Fairmarkit