Procurement has long been overlooked within the marketing sector, but the recent global shutdown and the – almost – overnight change in how we do business showed just how important it is to be able to have a speedy and agile procurement process in place. And who better to explain just how vital the specialism is for the marketing world than Tina Fegent who, with 25 years experience, is one of the country’s leading experts. 

Tina established many of the first Marketing Procurement teams in the UK and there isn’t a category of marketing that she hasn’t procured. In 2006 she set up Tina Fegent Consulting to offer a Marketing Procurement Consultancy service to clients. Recent clients have included Amazon, SSE, PepsiCo, Halfords, Imperial Tobacco, Checkatrade, P&O Ferries and Aldi.

This episode covers:   

• Why procurement is such a vital part of the agency ecosystem
• If you pitch marketing agencies – you need to target procurement as part of your sales strategy 
• How procurement usually works within agencies 
• How to approach procurement in order to sell to them 
• The power of creating specific events if you’re looking to open doors with procurement teams at agencies 
• What shifts procurement is seeing now that the focus of protecting business from the pandemic is calming down 
• Why recent situations have shown that speed and agility are right at the top of the procurement essentials list 
• What will happen if clients are going to expect work-from-home overhead reductions to be reflected in agency pricing
• Word on the Street is sponsored by Kulea.ma, the default Business Development and Marketing Automation platform for agencies and their clients. To learn more about Kulea’s Business development and marketing services and technology, visit www.kulea.ma

Links & references

Katie Street: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestreet/

Tina Fegent https://www.linkedin.com/in/tina-fegent-fcips-2103573/

Tina Fegent Marketing Procurement and Consulting https://tinafegent.com/

Get in touch: [email protected]

Episode Highlight 

“The press didn’t help sometimes because you did see some poor action, which was then exemplified and you had people jumping on the bandwagon, but everyone has learned from it” – 11:30 

“Procurement is a target market for new business and also for long term growth as well” – 12:05

“I think procurement is going to play more of an important role as we go to better ethics, which is what sustainability is about; looking at your supply chain and D & I to make sure you’ve got that balance” – 15:30 

“Sometimes the problem with procurement is we just see the tactical end of marketing, we don’t see the other steps” – 20:50

“Doing a little bit of market research makes all the difference. If you’re looking for a procurement person, why not look them up on LinkedIn, it’s such an obvious thing. It’s those things that do make all the difference” – 25:40

“There was a study done by Accenture last year which said that procurement, as a whole, has been really slow to adopt digitisation” – 27:55

“There’s lots of systems out there, I think you’ll start to see consolidation of those” – 29:15 

“I think on the on-going management of suppliers and agencies you’ll start to see more AI and technology being used” – 30:35

“Profile, that’s what a lot of agencies fall down on” – 35:25