Wednesday 19 June 2013

Procurement Looks to Service Professionals for Help with Negotiations

Authored by Mike Roberts

Recently, at the Procurecon Marketing Conference in London, Steve Lightfoot - communications procurement manager for the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), spoke about the importance of procurement teams learning about the marketing and advertising business.

As procurement teams play a bigger role in the selection of advertising and marketing agencies, it’s important to understand how agencies operate and make their money, in order to negotiate terms effectively. It’s also important for procurement to understand what services each bidding agency provides.

Some organisations have even gone so far to recruit marketers to join their procurement teams, deeply involving them in the sourcing process.

This strategy can be adopted for sourcing other services as well. While procurement are very effective at the process and negotiation side of creating RFPs and evaluating bids, it’s the end-user who often understands what they need in a supplier best. This isn’t a radical idea, but there is often tension in the relationship and so the concept is rarely fully implemented.
Effective collaboration between procurement and the end-users can also improve negotiations throughout the purchasing process, guaranteeing that the service that is procured will be used and of the most value to the business.






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