Creating and expanding advisory relationships with C-level financial executives can be a profitable way to grow your practice. Many businesses and other organizations struggle to control their spending and your firm’s ability to provide insights and strategies to help these clients manage their purchasing and procurement functions, streamline their vendor management and control cash flow on a day-to-day basis as well as reporting on trends in these areas over time as part of their overall financial picture can be highly valuable.
Integrating these business processes into a spend management service can give you the key to unlocking a profitable niche, serving C-level clients in financial, supply chain management and executive oversight positions. By providing these advisory services, you can help your clients shift from focusing simply on cost savings to making spend management a strategic advantage for their business.
In order to gain C-level support for spend management services, your team needs to have a thorough understanding of the benefits spend management provides and be able to present them clearly and concisely to your clients. The bottom line advantage for businesses with a structured spend management solution is that they are able to save time and money maximizing the value of the dollars they spend, while also achieving transparency and control over their vendor relationships and procurement functions. A solid spend management service offering often includes the following:
- Budgeting – Providing the framework for your clients to create budgets and track against their spending.
- Policies & Procedures – Working with clients to develop and implement spend management policies and procedures.
- Spend Management Systems – Helping your clients find and implement systems that will automate and streamline their procure to pay processes.
- Reporting – Providing valuable metrics and analysis that allow your clients to make better decisions.
In addition to using your advisory skills and knowledge to create a framework for spend management customized to each organization, your firm will also create additional value by providing spend management tools which allow your client to systematize each of these areas. One example is Spendwise, a cloud-based spend management solution that can help your clients manage these processes while capturing the data your firm needs for reporting and analysis.
From your firm’s perspective, working with C-level clients to help them structure and implement spend management solutions can be the key to unlocking an expansive and profitable advisory services niche.