Walk into most companies and you will find two functions doing similar work, but with very polarised reputations.
Sales gets lauded with applause and celebrates its successes.
Procurement gets the eye-roll and quietly performs under the radar.
Both spend their days negotiating, managing relationships, and moving deals toward a close. Yet one is treated as an engine of growth, and the other as a checkpoint to navigate through.
That differential isn’t being driven by the actual work being performed. Instead, we should observe how each function behaves and how it sells itself internally within the organization.
Procurement has quietly improves its deep relationship skills over the past decade. It hasn’t been easy, but steady progress has definitely been visible.
I argue that the next step necessary is borrowing a few habits from the people down the corridor who never stop chasing.
This article looks at what procurement can learn from sales, and where the two functions are actually closer to each other than either cares to admit.
What are the similarities between Procurement and Sales Teams?
Sales and procurement sit on opposite sides of the table, but the muscles they use are the same.
Both are relationship-driven. A buyer managing a strategic supplier and a rep managing a key account do very similar work: negotiating terms, reading the other side, and building enough trust that problems get solved with a phone call or a meeting rather than a legal letter.
Both live or die on soft skills, even though the scoreboard shows hard numbers.
- Sales reports revenue and margin.
- Procurement reports savings and risk mitigation.
Neither result happens without influence, timing, and the ability to read a room. A great buyer who cannot persuade a budget holder is just as stuck as a sales rep who cannot handle an objection.
Both act as translators.
- Sales sits between the customer and its own delivery teams.
- Procurement sits between internal stakeholders and external suppliers.
The job in both cases is turning a messy internal need into a clean external deal, then turning what the market offers back into something the business can use.
Both think in pipelines.
- A sales pipeline forecasts deals moving through stages toward a close.
- Procurement runs the same logic across sourcing projects, supplier onboarding, and contract renewals, each moving through stages toward signature or renewal.
The vocabulary differs but the shape doesn’t.
Procurement vs. Sales – Where are the key differences?
The habits diverge where incentives and culture tend to pull them apart.
Sales pursues:
It hunts, chases revenue, and treats a quiet week as a problem.
Procurement often reacts:
We wait until someone contacts us with a request or a contract renewalbefore we get moving.
- Sales plays offence.
- Procurement has traditionally played defence.
Pay structures reinforce the split.
- Most sales reps earn commission tied directly to their own close rate, so feedback arrives fast and personal.
- Procurement usually has a fixed salary with a small bonus. They are judged on annual savings, where the feedback loop can run a full year before anyone notices the full effect on the P&L.
Training and resourcing points in different directions too.
- Sales teams drill persuasion, objection-handling, and closing until those skills become reflex. Subscriptions to market intelligence and data services are routine. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are the foundation of every sales department.
- Procurement training leans toward process, compliance, and maybe some negotiation courses. That’s if they receive any formal training at all. Data is messy and the tech? Often just a spreadsheet or a clunky, legacy source-to-pay tool.
Sales teams are trained to speak in a way that changes minds in a meeting. Procurement is often schooled in technocracy rather than effective communication.
This all flows through to the reputation of procurement vs. sales.
- Sales is seen as the growth driver.
- Procurement is often cast as the process enforcer, even when it does the same relationship-based work.
Deloitte’s 2025 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey found that 57% of procurement leaders cited siloed ways of working as something that dilutes focus. Furthermore, 46% recognised organizational or technology capability as an issue preventing them from being able to execute effectively.
These reputational and resourcing challenges underscore why we as procurement still have a significant gap to close when it comes to effective business partnering.
| Dimension | Sales | Procurement (traditionally) |
|---|---|---|
| Orientation | Hunts and pursues revenue | Reacts to internal requests |
| Incentive | Commission, fast feedback | Salary, annual feedback |
| Core training | Persuasion and closing | Process and compliance |
| Internal image | Growth driver | Blocker or cost centre |
| Deal posture | Offence | Defence |
What procurement could learn from sales
None of this means procurement should start cold-calling suppliers or using sales closing techniques in commercial negotiations. But it does mean adopting four habits that sales teams have spent decades refining.
Manage the supplier pipeline proactively
Sales never lets a lead go cold. Follow-up is a religion, because the data backs it up: research compiled by Invesp shows 80% of sales need at least five follow-ups after the first meeting, yet 44% of reps give up after one.
Procurement is often dragged into reactive work. Rather than effectively implementing and executing a category plan, the day-to-day rules our inbox.
The cost of that neglect is measurable. World Commerce & Contracting puts the value lost to poor contract management at around 9% of annual revenue for a typical company. On $100 million of contracted spend, that is $9 million leaking out:
- Renewals nobody dedicated the right amount of time to;
- Scope that crept unnoticed and untouched;
- Contracted terms that weren’t respected on invoices and that nobody caught and enforced.
The fix is pure sales discipline applied to supplier relationship management (SRM).
- Track every contract in one place.
- Trigger the renewal conversation at least 90 to 120 days before expiry, so you negotiate from a position of preparation rather than panic.
- Treat a renewal as sales would a live deal in a pipeline; not an admin task that appears on a calendar reminder.
Tell the story, not just the numbers
Salespeople sell the “why” before the “what.” They open with the problem the buyer feels, then bring the product in as the answer.
Procurement tends to do the reverse. It delivers $2 million in savings, drops a number into a spreadsheet, and wonders why nobody outside finance seems to care.
The value is real but it’s missing the story around how it was achieved. We need to lean into the sales instinct here.
Frame a savings win as a business outcome: the two extra engineers that money funded, the price rise you absorbed so a product line stayed profitable, the supplier failure you prevented before it hit production.
Numbers prove the case, but a story makes people remember it and repeat it in rooms you’re absent from.
Handle objections instead of avoiding them
Sales reps are trained to treat “no” as “not yet.” An objection is information, a signal about what the other side actually needs to move.
Procurement meets objections constantly. A stakeholder insists on their preferred supplier. A supplier refuses to move on price. The instinct is often to escalate or retreat.
A sales-trained response digs instead:
- What is behind the resistance?
- What would have to be true to change the answer?
- Where is there an opening that nobody has spotted yet?
Take the stakeholder who is completely hostile to changing from an incumbent supplier who is difficult to work with commercially. A blunt “no” from them ends the conversation. Whereas a better open-ended question uncovers the reason and the logic behind why they don’t want to move.
Now you have something to work with. A case to build to persuade them, or other options to propose in order to disarm their hostility towards switching. That approach turns a maverick stakeholder into a potential partner.
Build a personal brand inside the business
Good reps build a reputation people want to work with. Colleagues take their calls because those calls tend to be useful.
Procurement can earn the same standing, but only by shedding the gatekeeper image.
You must target earlier involvement before a decision is locked. Show up as someone who unblocks rather than someone who slows things down. If you’re a buyer known for finding options and moving fast, you’re more likely to be invited into projects at the start.
A buyer known only for policy gets looped in at the end, on the other hand, when the leverage is already gone.
Conclusion: How can Procurement learn and benefit from Sales traits?
Sales is a hunter tracking prey through the forest.
Always moving, always closing the distance, never satisfied with a quiet day.
Procurement has traditionally been more like a park ranger.
Maintaining, monitoring, keeping order across the estate. That work matters, and the discipline behind it is real.
The upside for procurement is borrowing a few hunter instincts without abandoning the ranger’s judgement: the urgency to chase a renewal before it lapses, the persuasion to sell a win internally, the appetite to pursue value rather than wait for it to arrive. The relationship skills are already there.
What sales offers is a sharper sense of when to move and how to be remembered for it. The function that adds both to its toolkit stops being the department people work around and starts being the one they call first.
