PM Society Members’ Webinar
Join us for the next in our FREE webinar series for members of the PM Society. PM Talks Live brings live online discussion and debate to our membership across a range of topics.
Webinar title: | What Procurement Will Never Tell You |
Date: | Tuesday 3rd November |
Time: | 12.30pm–1:30pm |
Location: | Online |
Join a webinar with Gilles Chatelin (ex-Pharma Global Procurement)
You will NOT learn about procurement theory, but you will learn what is actually happening behind the scenes.
The angle is simple: every procurement speaker that agencies have heard at conferences is still employed in the function, so they must say the “right things”: Deliver value, business partnering, stakeholder management, long term supplier partnership, win-win, blah, blah, blah, etc.
It is, of course, hard to push back and really challenge them on stage.
Gilles Chatelin spent twenty years in procurement. For most of that time he defended it, and himself - to everyone in the ecosystem: to agencies, brand leads, medical comms, and also to friends at dinner. He told himself the function was misunderstood. Some of that was true. But most of it was not.
Gilles no longer works in procurement.
He can now say what he actually observed:
Procurement reports to finance, which means it gets measured on cost savings, not value.
The business partnering language is real in ambition and rare in practice.
Agencies lose pitches for reasons nobody explains because nobody inside procurement is incentivised to explain them.
And the marketer who told you they would protect you, often did not, because they handed the conversation to procurement precisely to avoid owning it.
Gilles Chatelin spent over twenty years as a senior procurement leader inside global pharma, including a decade at Takeda Pharmaceuticals managing more than $1.5 billion in professional services and marketing spend. He no longer works in procurement, which means he no longer has to defend it.
He now works as an independent executive coach and advisor, helping agency founders, CEOs and senior leaders navigate pressure, high-stakes decisions, and commercial relationships with pharma clients. He holds an Executive Coaching Certificate from INSEAD.