Procurement

The corporate function that formalizes a purchase after the buying decision is essentially made — reviewing contract terms, price, and vendor compliance before money moves. It is a gate, not a sales stage: procurement does not reopen whether to buy, it checks whether the paperwork is in order. On $50k+ deals a CFO/finance approval gate typically applies, and legal/procurement is the single largest cause of late-stage delay. The power move is structural, not persuasive — enter the deal above procurement through executive relationships so you arrive as the incumbent expert whose papers just need stamping, and present options so procurement negotiates within your menu rather than against a single number.

Source: Gary S. Luefschuetz, Selling Professional Services to the Fortune 500 (McGraw-Hill) — the only book-length treatment of enterprise procurement and contracting. On entering above procurement and using options to shape the negotiation: Blair Enns, Pricing Creativity (via The Drum). Late-stage-delay data: Optifai benchmarks (VENDOR).

First used in: 3.3 · Procurement, MSA/SOW & the paper process