Partnerships, Data and Talent Management

Building trust and credibility with your marketing department will end in a true partnership and deliver better results than an acrimonious relationship. The key to working with marketing is to understand how to communicate with them, using their vocabulary, and understanding their needs and acknowledging the expertise they bring to the table. Hear from a leading CMO on how they would like to work with procurement, how procurement should work with them and the things you absolutely shouldn’t do.

As technology is making it easier to bring many services, such as social media monitoring, programmatic buying, data management, etc., in house, what technologies and tools are worth investing in?
• How can you, as a marketing procurement practitioner, get involved in the technology buying process to take some of the guesswork away?
• What interplay should marketing have with IT when sourcing marketing technologies, to ensure they’re in compliance with company IT standards, have the correct IP protections, don’t overlap with any current supplier agreements, etc? How does procurement serve as mediator?
• Ensuring that you, marketing or IT have the resource allocation to properly integrate new technologies
• Is it better to buy a complete suite of marketing tools, or choose best in class from separate providers? What are the benefits and disadvantages of both options?

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As the marketing function becomes more reliant on data and process automation, a new layer of tools and compliance issues are starting to come into the marketplace, getting marketers to think differently about how they execute and measure their marketing plans. Procurement and Legal should be getting involved to make sure the contracts, and level of service, fit the needs of the company to keep costs in check and data secure, and also ensure the investment can produce returns. But what exactly should procurement be looking for?
Discuss with your peers:
• How to contract a third party data management supplier
• Building the data architecture for servicing a marketing program
• Making marketing smarter by inputting better data
• Who should own and manage the data?
• What to do in case of a breach, and how to limit indemnification
• How much data you’re comfortable with suppliers storing
• Onboarding and leveraging data
• Converting data into actionable marketing intelligence

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• When hiring which one of these criteria should take a priority over the other – soft skills, cultural match, and category expertise in areas such as digital, consumer products and market intelligence?
• Is it better to train internally or hire outside expertise? Where have you seen the most success?
• Where the marketing procurement leaders of tomorrow are coming from - is it better to recruit from agencies, or internally from marketing departments and procurement?
• Comparing external resources for discovering new talent - LinkedIn, recruitment companies, graduate networks, mentoring programs and other online or outsourcing networks - is there a clear winner?

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After 2.5 days of panel discussions, presentations, workshops and roundtables, is there anything you’d like to explore in more depth? Is there anything else you’d like to hear more about? Beginner and intermediate marketing procurement practitioners will be paired with marketing procurement visionaries for 30 minutes of collaboration. Gain insight into how they achieved their wins, and strategies for changing the conversation back home.