Preventing and Managing Backdoor Selling

Are supplier salespeople circumventing your procurement processes in order to maximize their profits? If so, they are doing so at the expense of your organization. As a procurement professional, it is your job to put a stop to that supplier behavior, called “backdoor selling.”

Supplier salespeople are often so skilled at backdoor selling that their customers do not even realize how much money they are losing as a result. And it has traditionally been very difficult for procurement professionals like you to figure out effective approaches for eliminating backdoor selling from their organizations. But there is good news! Several best practices have emerged in recent years that can reverse the disturbing growth of backdoor selling. Learning these best practices can help you match the skills of the most highly successful, manipulative suppliers and, as a result, save your organization quite a lot of money. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:

• Identify the various forms of backdoor selling
• Understand how suppliers disguise sleazy techniques in the form of innocent sounding questions
• Negotiate with a supplier who has already gotten an internal customer to commit to a purchase
• Apply the four components of backdoor selling prevention
• Implement an anti-backdoor-selling policy
• Obtain support from senior management
• Effectively team up with stakeholders to address sneaky suppliers
• Develop messages for suppliers to encourage the behavior you want and discourage the behavior you don’t

This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 30 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately one hour to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.

This course has been pre-approved for 1 hour of CE credit towards the CPOS, CPOP, CPOM, and CPOE certifications.