#Buyer: What are your greenhouse gases emissions?
#Supplier: we don't have any greenhouses…
Actual conversation between a large F&B player and a supplier; heard at this year's #DPW.
It's easy to make fun of these examples, but reality is that our supplier #sustainability engagement is made much more difficult by sustainability being a highly complex topic, and new to most functions engaged on it.
In our internal analysis, more than 50% of the supplier contacts sit in sales (more on this in a later post). Only ~4% have sustainability oriented roles ⚠️
This has a few consequences:
1️⃣ Your supplier contacts don't always have the seniority, connections or time to connect you to the right person internally, so you're sometimes relying on the direct contact to provide you with the information.
2️⃣ Sustainability is very likely a new topic to them. Just like sustainability is a new topic to your procurement team. For sustainability professionals it's easy to forget how complicated our trade is - it took us, at Responsibly, a few years before we finally developed a detailed 50 slide training document and onboarding process, especially for sales and operations hires.
3️⃣ Their operations or sustainability teams definitely don't appreciate it when sales disturb them for the 50th time with a new esg questionnaire that needs to be filled out. So sales can hesitate to do this for smaller customers, leaving you without answers.
What are the takeaways:
👉 Be careful of being arrogant in your supplier sustainability engagement program; yes you pay them and should be able to expect an answer on these requests, but it's not so simple.
👉 Sustainability is different from other supplier engagement due to its complexity and reliance on other internal stakeholders.
👉 Make it easy for the contact. Ideally let them share information already captured for other customers or accreditors rather than enforcing your specific format.
👉 Help educate your supplier, or at least give them access to simple resources to understand what you're asking about and how they can get the information. Don't expect everyone to know what greenhouse gases are 😊
Comments