Blog

By Nick Thakkar, Director, Strategic Sourcing, MDC Partners Inc.

I’ve had the great fortune to work with marketers and procurement practitioners in various capacities. My career started in consulting which gave me an “external” view of some great organizations specific to marketing and procurement and how those functions co-exist. Then I was in the industry, closely coordinating efforts between the two. I was a member of the procurement team but spent most of my time with marketers and “sat” with them. Now I am an in-house consultant supporting great marketing and advertising agencies in creating stronger relationships with marketing procurement professionals, marketers and finance resources at the client level.

In my experience, I’ve seen that investment needs to be seen as a strategy. That does not mean spending recklessly. It means investing in the resources that are in charge of your brand: both the internal resources that touch your brand and the right talent at your partner agency (or agencies). These investments, if done properly, will enable you to take calculated risks and will allow you to invest in ideas that are “future thinking” and those that can transform a brand or even an organization.

Investing in internal resources is generally a sound strategy, but for our purposes I’ll focus on marketing and procurement. Developing the right talent in these areas is critical for many reasons. Most importantly, these individuals are impacting your product and brand on a daily basis. To invest in marketers is to provide growth and learning opportunities for them. It ensures they understand the ways in which their consumers are changing, and the ways to communicate with them is also in flux. After all, sticking to what has worked is not a guarantee of what will work. I should clarify that simply having more resources in digital or digital training alone is enough. Helping shopper marketing team members understand how consumers interact with brands differently in-store or how retailers’ Wi-Fi platforms can be a great targeting strategy (when consumers opt-in, of course) are two other examples.

How do you invest in your procurement team? Provide them with training that addresses their understanding of marketers’ needs and the current stage for marketers. With this, procurement members can understand that their role goes beyond contracts and comparing quotes. It also involves identifying new solutions being leveraged by competitors and leaders in the space, as well as being able to bring new solutions and ideas to the marketer and then helping them set up metrics. The moment at which procurement can bring innovation and a new way of thinking to marketers is the moment when the group will live up to the name Strategic Sourcing and build the foundation for a long term partnership with marketers.

Now that you have the right talent internally, what’s next? Invest in the right talent with your agency. Why is it important to invest in your agency and specifically invest in their talent? To clearly articulate this point, let’s step back for a minute. The reason any organization looks externally for help, whether from an agency, management consultant, legal counsel, etc., is to gain knowledge of the broader industry and make sure that the organization is taking a best-in-class approach. So investing in the right talent should be a key priority and metric when looking for external partners. Again, that does not mean spending recklessly, but identifying why you are hiring the agency and investing in the right level of talent. This is where a strong foundation between marketing and procurement is critical. An open dialogue will allow procurement to identify the marketer’s need and identify appropriate agencies, and importantly, when it’s time to put together the scope, there will be alignment. Procurement can be a great partner for marketing to sell an agency to senior leadership, drive home that the investment is a smart one, and reinforce that the investment is right for the objective at hand.

Investing in the right talent (internally and externally) can help an organization create game changing work. Scale and efficiency alone cannot create sustainable competitive advantage. To move beyond that and to think differently, the partnership between marketing, procurement and agencies has to evolve and each has to invest in the other for mutual sustainable growth.