Procurement Perspective: Save Time & Money With Whiteboard Sessions

July 26th, 2016 | Donald Lee, MDC Partners

MDC Partners’ Donald Lee is not new to the Procurement Game, but the 15-year veteran is relatively new to the agency side of the equation. With his first piece for ACA’s blog, Lee aims to start a conversation about how procurement, the client and agency can work better together.

Business people looking at blank whiteboard in the office

I do not believe marketing is a commodity, and one should not treat this category like one would procure logistics, MRO (maintenance, repair and operations) or resin.

The same rules do not apply and you can’t simply go to the next supplier to get the same results.

Doing more with less is a saying we have all heard, and marketing managers’ budgets are no different. The issue is that some of us carry this saying to agencies. We expect these agencies to manage the same scope and deliverables with less money, and it’s perpetuated because some agencies do it at their fiscal detriment.

Agencies will either suck it up for a short time or give their junior talent a shot. With a reduction in creativity, some client side managers will then move to review the business with the smaller budget and push for deliverables within the original scope.

That may be a solution for a year with a top-tier agency, but that same agency will ask for a price increase or give you the Junior talent squad the second year. Often, the time and money it takes to review the business, onboard and bring a new agency up-to-speed are lost costs (in the pain of change) to an existing marketing manager’s budget, which is already tight in money and time.

A more cost-effective and strategic way to work with agencies and marketing managers is to review the original scope, figure out what is mission critical vs. nice to have and what is discretionary. Agencies can be very innovative at finding creative alternative solutions at lower cost points.

The challenge is finding a way to meet procurement’s objective to reduce costs, client goals to tell a complex story and get a compelling ROI, and the agency’s desire to do great creative. All three are not always possible.

I will address one way to get there today, and discuss other methods in future posts:

Scrap the old-school 7-step RFP process and use whiteboard sessions instead.

What is a whiteboard session? It’s when the client has an idea of where it wants to go and introduces it to an agency with procurement in the room. All three parties sit down and work through building a scope with projected costs to meet the required deliverables.

This saves time and money that would have been consumed by an agency responding to an RFP and a client going back and forth requesting additional information and/or several pricing models.

If a client uses a whiteboarding session to flush out scope with a potential agency, several things happen.

  • The client and procurement leave with a realistic roadmap and defined results tied to the budget (too many times folks expect a platinum solution on a shoestring budget).
  • Clients get feedback on their cost estimates and understand if they are in line with potential deliverables.
  • The agency will appreciate being part of the discussion, and procurement can leverage this once the business is awarded.

The whiteboard session is also an opportunity to really flush out if there is chemistry between the agency and the client. This process can also reduce risk as it offers the opportunity to identify the things you didn’t know that you didn’t know.

While I was on the client side, my VP told me that hitting my savings target by any means would not guarantee I would have a job after annual reviews. On the other hand, my VP said that if I missed my savings target but my clients felt I was irreplaceable, I would still have a job. It’s a lesson I’ve taken to heart and believe should be a goal we all have – building solid relationships and doing the right thing.

So with that, I would like to open a conversation about what is and is not working. Not all agencies are out to take advantage of budgets, not all procurement professionals just care about the bottom line. Let’s take a journey down a road that has been traveled countless times and see if there is anything of value we can build upon.

Donald Lee is Director, Strategic Sourcing, at advertising holding company MDC Partners. Previously, he was a Senior Sourcing Manager supporting Marketing and Advertising at The Walt Disney Company. Before Disney, he was in procurement at Mars Inc., working on supply chain solutions in co-manufacturing and co-packing.