Marketing spend is one of those areas which often goes untouched. While many larger companies don't have a policy of having procurement manage this spend, smaller companies and especially startups don't have in-house procurement teams but nonetheless, they still have a considerable marketing budget as they grow and scale as a business.

Enter Sarah Scudder, my guest on this podcast. Sarah is a marketing services procurement expert and also the co-founder of a software company which helps companies procure print media.

We dive into how most requests and POs for marketing spend are for print and promotional items. While this creates most of the work, it's often often not where the real value is delivered, this being high frequency but low PO value in nature. By optimising and automating this, marketing procurement can add more value on where the big bucks are spent, on digital and visual media.

Marketing & Promotional Spend – Sarah Scudder from Real Sourcing Network

2:47

Sarah explains how buying marketing services is different to many other categories, and how bringing procurement in to manage their vendors can often be contentious.

5:14

Why difficulty at the beginning to engage and persuade stakeholders shouldn't put you off, and why marketing spend is a huge untapped opportunity that has a great potential to bring home some fast savings.

6:49

Sarah sheds some light on why senior marketing leaders are often prickly when procurement want to come onto their patch and manage their spend.

8:41

Why digital media and print media, as the main big buckets of marketing spend in most companies, are 2 very different beasts.

10:35

We dig into some specifics of print media and how it fits into the classic 80/20 pareto of it being 20% of the spend but 80% of the workload and total vendor count.

13:18

Sarah introduces how sourceit as a tool can assist with reducing workload and making processes transparent when it comes to sourcing print media requirements, both as an internally hosted catalogue for frequently purchased items as well as a guided RFQ process for one-time buys.

17:30

Why print media has many different nuances that are tricky to take into consideration if you don't have a strong background in procuring the category, and how sourceit already take this into account as part of the guided RFQ process.

19:20

Sarah walks through how, unlike most e-sourcing solutions, sourceit offers a mixture of both an outsourced procurement service for organisations who don't have their won marketing procurement, as well as the SaaS product as a stand alone solution for bigger organisations who just want to increase their productivity.

21:40

We get down to talking turkey about how to convince the business to use this type of solution in terms of hard and soft benefits.

28:08

Now is a better time than ever to penetrate marketing organisations and reach out to gain influence over their spend, as budgets are cut and they are having to deliver more with less.

How to connect with Sarah:

Sarah's LinkedIn profile

sourceit website

Real Sourcing Network website

How to connect with James:

James Meads Consulting website

James' LinkedIn profile

Book a Call with James

Follow The Procuretech Podcast on LinkedIn