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HOW DO I SELL A SERVICE THAT FIRMS DON’T KNOW THEY NEED?
Kavita Cooper has founded a business that promises to take the pain out of procurement, but she’s finding it a tough sell to enterprises that don’t understand what they could gain from smarter supply-chain management. She asks our panel of seasoned IoD members how best to convince them
Words Ryan Herman
when it came to finding the right suppliers and managing them. This gave her the idea for Novo-K, which she started in 2015. “I wanted to help charities – including Parkinson’s UK and the Quakers – with strategic procurement,” she recalls. “This wasn’t just about achieving cost savings for them. It was also about getting value for money and managing risk.” Her venture soon branched out into the private sector, targeting SMEs without dedicated procurement teams and offering them wider supply management services. This year Novo-K established JoCoBu (short for join, collaborate, buy), an online “B2B community connecting buyers to the right suppliers”.
Cooper explains: “We built this because it needed to exist. We engage with so many suppliers, but wanted to put them in one place and make them more accessible to potential clients. We’re also trying to encourage collaboration among businesses with shared values, as we can see that this is becoming more important to buyers.”
Procurement suffers something of an image problem in many organisations, which see the process as tiresome, risky and costly. Kavita Cooper, the founder and MD of Novo-K, wants to change all that. Her firm is on a mission to “simplify” how SMEs and charities obtain the goods and services they need.
By her own admission, it was a function that she’d actually avoided earlier in her career. But, when she became BT’s global head of procurement in 2013, Cooper discovered that she “loved its structure and the fact that it could bring so much value to an organisation”.
After getting involved with BT’s volunteering programme, Cooper realised that even the biggest charities needed help
JoCoBu has already attracted business from Australia, Canada and China, but Cooper concedes that procurement remains a tough sell for her. “Many people see it as a pain in the backside. To them, it exists purely to reduce cost, which sometimes reduces quality,” she says. “I’d like to know how you sell this service, particularly to senior execs, when they feel it’s maybe something they don’t need. Most of them will say: ‘We need marketing and we need sales,’ but if I tell them: ‘You need procurement,’ they reply: ‘Why? Each budget owner will do their own procurement.’ So how do we position something that isn’t exciting but could have a huge impact on their bottom lines?” Over to our expert panellists.
KAVITA COOPER, the founder and MD of Novo-K, spent much of her career at BT, working her way up the group’s ranks after joining its retail arm as a sales consultant in 2002. By 2013 she was the company’s global head of procurement, accountable for more than £350 million of annual expenditure. At the time she was also in charge of a volunteering scheme that encouraged BT’s 10,000-plus employees to engage in activities to support charitable causes. She found that many of the charities that she was working with in this capacity
were lacking effective procurement systems, which inspired her to start her business. Cooper, who has a degree in chemistry and computer science from Nottingham Trent University, is a member of the IoD
SUZIE HOWELL
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