Leveraging Qualification and Discovery Questions

Align your solution pitch with your customer's needs. By incorporating targeted questions into your initial conversations, you can gain valuable insights that enable you to tailor your pitch more precisely.

There are three areas you’ll want to focus on:

1. The organization’s current workforce practices
2. Their oversight of current external worker procurement transactions
3. Their current uses of external workers

These three types of questions provide a comprehensive view of an organization's external workforce management, from high-level strategies and structures to daily operations and risk management.

These questions help you understand the overall structure, needs, and current management practices of the organization regarding external workers and how they fit into the overall workforce. They provide a high-level overview of how the organization operates and who is responsible for what.

Key areas they cover: Workforce size and composition, skill needs and locations, business disruption risks, IT landscape, access control, procurement processes, workforce management strategies, and spending on the external workforce.

Start by asking…

• How many employees does your organization have? Does that include external workers?
• Do you know what skills your organization needs? Do you know geographically where those skills are needed?
• Will business be disrupted if they (external workers) leave?

Then you can drill down with more targeted and probing questions…

• What is your existing IT landscape (ERP, HCM, etc.)?
• How do you control building access?
• Do you work with a Managed Service Provider (MSP) today?
• Do you actively manage organizational capability through skills frameworks, job architectures, or something similar? Is this same process applied across the external workforce?
• How do you decide whether to use direct employees versus contingent workers versus service providers?
• Who within the organization is primarily responsible for your external workforce and services arrangements? HR? Procurement? Individual Lines of Business? A mixture of stakeholders?
• How much do you spend on the external workforce annually? Do you know what proportion is contingent labor versus services engagements?

These questions delve into the day-to-day management and tracking of external workers. They help identify how efficiently the organization handles payments, project tracking, tenure tracking, invoicing, and supplier engagement.

Key areas they cover: Pay rates and market benchmarks, project outsourcing and deliverables, tenure tracking, invoicing processes, access and compliance management, supplier engagement, contract evaluation, supplier performance measurement, and invoice processing.

Start by asking…

• Do you know how much you’re paying each worker? Are those rates in line with the market benchmark?
• Do you know what projects you’ve outsourced?
• Do you have defined deliverables within those?
• Are you able to track tenure for external workers?

Then you can drill down with more targeted and probing questions…

• How do you receive invoices from the suppliers?
• How do you track external workers today?
• How do you manage access and compliance policies during the on and off boarding process for external workers?
• How does your team engage suppliers? How do they engage those preferred suppliers that might be outside of the formal process?
• How do you evaluate the performance of, and subsequently optimize contracts for your external workforce?
• How do you measure Supplier performance (Cost, Process Speed, Value for Money) for your external workforce?
• How are external workforce invoices received, reconciled and paid? Is the process effective?

These questions aim to understand the organization's awareness and control over its external workforce's activities, skills, spending, and risk management. They also explore the organization's processes for sourcing and vetting external talent.

Key areas they cover: Awareness of external workers' tasks and skills, annual spending on external workers, timeline management, contract end dates, site access management, system access control, procurement capability leveraging, risk management, sourcing and vetting processes, and current challenges in managing the external workforce.

Start by asking…

• Do you know what the external workers you’ve engaged are doing?
• Do you know what skills the external workers have?
• How much do you spend annually on external workers?
• Are timelines being met?
• Do you know which contractors have approached end dates on their contracts?

Then you can drill down with more targeted and probing questions…

• Do you know which sites external workers have access to?
• Are you able to systematically shut off system access once a contract ends?
• How do you ensure that you are leveraging your organizations Procurement capability while managing the external workforce process?
• How do you manage organizational risk related to the external workforce? (for example, co-employment, intellectual property, fraud, statutory obligations)
• What is your process for sourcing and vetting external talent? What are your pain points?
• What are your current top 3-5 challenges managing your external workforce and suppliers?