experience matters

Diane Heun – Critical Mass Chicago

There are two words that can instill fear in most people associated with new business efforts or existing client reviews:

1) Procurement

2) eSourcing

And, typically these go hand-in-hand.  An organization’s procurement department puts out a request for information (RFI) or request for proposal (RFP) through an electronic sourcing system such as Ariba or SAP.  It’s a scenario that’s becoming more and more common and as a member of the Critical Mass New Business team for over eight years, I’ve certainly participated in my fair share.

As a digital agency, the focus at Critical Mass is to deliver ‘extraordinary experiences’ to our clients–and certainly in new business efforts as well.  For the most part, I’ve found that when procurement either leads or is heavily involved in a review it becomes much more difficult to deliver the level of extraordinary that we strive for.  There are a number of challenges with these types of reviews including:

a)      The review process tends to be overly structured and constrained. Our pitch team may not have interaction with key digital, brand or marketing folks on the client side during the review phase.  Follow-up information to help clarify strategy, requirements and client needs can be tougher to get.  I’ve seen situations where it’s pretty obvious procurement contacts are trying to answer key business, brand and customer segment questions (usually with a response that provides little to no insight or value).   This makes it difficult to hone in on the challenges and needs of the company and deliver a strategy and creative vision that helps them see the potential for digital in their business.   With this situation, we often ask ourselves whether this client is really interested in extraordinary at all.  The system and process show us that perhaps procurement undervalues the key elements of an experience and relationship such as ideas, journeys and chemistry.

b)      Financials tend to play a larger role throughout the review with costing spreadsheets, detailed rate cards and/or pay-for-performance models.  Typically, we are asked to provide this information early on at the RFI / RFP stage to enable procurement to compare fees and ‘value’ across all participants.  But the question becomes whether procurement folks really understand how to derive marketing ‘value’ across various participants.  The ANA recently issued highlights of survey results and best practices around the focus of procurement and agencies.  Not surprising, ‘84% of survey participants who were responsible for procurement stated their key objective when it came to marketing was getting the strongest results from their company’s expenditure’.  To combat this focus on financials, the ANA recommends ‘establishing common goals and reaching a shared definition of what constitutes “value” early on in the review process’.

c)        Add an e Sourcing system into the mix and now we’re limited to how much response content we can provide and how creative we can get with our proposal.  We’ve found it’s pretty difficult to do extraordinary work or show extraordinary thinking when you’re responding to these text-based systems.  I’ve personally been in situations where the system has repeatedly crashed while inputting content (usually at 3:00am) as well as frequent error messages that the content exceeds the question’s limit of 250 characters.  The best scenario is when we are able to include additional material, over and above the standard questions, that allow us to demonstrate unique thinking, value-add capabilities and what truly sets our agency apart.  Over the years, we’ve also learned (the hard way) that to manage these systems we need to review all response fields first to determine limitations in text and attachments, save and save often, confirm early in the process how large of a file size the system can handle and submit the final response well in advance of the deadline.

When procurement is involved there is a natural tendency to question whether the review is legit or simply an exercise to negotiate existing agency partners down on price.  A recent Ad Age article cites ‘fed up shops pitching a fit at procurement’ after exhaustive staffing plans and financial discussions across agency contenders.   In other situations, our team has been involved in situations where procurement is focused on streamlining the agency roster down to a few select digital partners.  After an intensive review process, we may be awarded a spot on the roster but not much else to show for it.  Even a year later, we have seen little to no digital activity with these types of ‘clients’.

Another recent ANA study also demonstrates a serious perception gap about procurement’s role within marketing departments.  And while the debate continues, procurement is starting to defend their role and tell their side of the story.   It’s interesting to note that even search consultants are feeling the impact as more clients move reviews internally in order to save fees.

While there’s no doubt procurement will continue to be involved in reviews going forward, we have seen a few instances where the process actually works (gasp!).  A good example is a global CPG leader where we’ve participated in a number of digital reviews over the years.  While procurement leads the review process, they act as a facilitator not a barrier. From the moment they issue the RFP to a select group of contenders, procurement contacts work to ensure all agencies have the information they need to respond and provide access to key client stakeholders for additional information sharing.  Procurement works diligently to schedule Q&A sessions in a timely manner and they participate in the meetings and calls. These individuals provide as much transparency into the review process as possible including sharing agency selection criteria.  They attend agency presentations and keep everyone posted on next steps, delays and the overall schedule. Once a final decision has been made, they provide candid post-review feedback.  The process, while fairly structured, works well for both participating agencies and the client and allows us to deliver our strongest thinking and work.

We can only hope the ongoing debate will help fuel discussion and education around the role of procurement to ensure a balanced review process where participating agencies can shine and deliver the strongest response possible. What do you think?  Has procurement helped or hindered the agency / client relationship and/or review process?

Diane is a Senior Business Development Director working remotely from Boston.