Buying

Buying and Selling Yorwin

by Chris Arlen

The following story is fictitious, but you’d have guessed that anyway. The marketing and selling lessons in it are true AND absolutely essential to marketing and selling anything, but even more true [...]

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Process at the Expense of Purpose

by Chris Arlen

When the process becomes more important than purpose strange things can happen, some not so good. Even responsible managers diligently working through a process, but without defining their purpose, can cause not [...]

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Janitorial Fact & Fiction

by Chris Arlen

March 16, 2009 Unhappy Janitors at Microsoft protest subcontractor’s cuts This article points to the janitorial subcontractor’s staffing cuts and unhappy janitors because of increased workloads. It made me wonder about our [...]

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A Janitorial Fable

by Chris Arlen

Long away and far ago the cleaning contract for Ubetcha Corporation was coming to the end of its term. The contract was for millions of square feet and millions of dollars. It [...]

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Responses to Customer-Contractor Relationship in 2009 Survey

by Chris Arlen

On January 28th we sent out a survey to get a feel for how the economy of 2009 might impact the customer-contractor relationship. This qualitative temperature check provided some interesting responses. Thank [...]

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Fear is…

by Chris Arlen

Fear is neither bad, nor good, it just is. Today it’s everywhere. Fear is in increasing job losses, vanishing pensions, frozen credit markets, and the worst recession since The Great Depression. Fear [...]

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What’s the Right Price for Service?

by Chris Arlen

If you’re buying, or managing, a contract service, this is the big question. Yet it feels more like a riddle than a question. And like a riddle, the answer is simple and [...]

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Greenwashing is…

by Chris Arlen

…the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service… Bandwagons are for jumping on. And Green is playing loudly everywhere, [...]

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Selling to Procurement

by Chris Arlen

An interesting insight came out of our interviews with Procurement professionals (Procurement Talks: An Interview with Microsoft and Expedia’s interview to be published next week). There’s not one style of procurement, but [...]

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Where You Stand

by Chris Arlen

Buyers want to succeed – sellers want the same. What’s in the way? Understanding each other. Sharing perspectives is a first step along the way to success. To that end I recently [...]

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