14. Empathy to enhance Marketing Procurement and agency-client relationship post Covid.

How  “empathy” can enhance Marketing Procurement? This episode sheds valuable insights thanks to Christine’s multifaceted background on Procurement, Agency and Consulting sides.

Rate (5 stars) on Apple Podcasts, Review & Subscribe. Feel free to invite others to join our Marketing Procurement Community.
Take care of yourself and take care of each other.

MAGID SOUHAMI LINKEDIN - https://www.linkedin.com/in/magid-souhami/
CHRISTINE A. MOORE LINKEDIN - http://linkedin.com/in/kristin-adamsson-moore
FIRMDECISIONS - https://www.linkedin.com/company/firmdecisions-asjp

1. Why transparency and trust will see us through this crisis -https://www.firmdecisions.com/articles/blog/why-transparency-and-trust-will-see-us-through-this-crisis/
2. Navigating an unchartered path with trusted agency partners -https://www.firmdecisions.com/articles/press/navigating-an-unchartered-path-with-trusted-agency-partners/
3. 2021: the year of scrutiny, transparency, and compliance -https://www.firmdecisions.com/articles/blog/2021-the-year-of-scrutiny-transparency-and-compliance/
4. Why auditing in a crisis is essential for better agency relationships -https://www.firmdecisions.com/articles/blog/why-auditing-in-a-crisis-is-essential-for-better-agency-relationships/

Transcript

14. Empathy to enhance Marketing Procurement and agency-client relationship post-Covid.

This is an auto-transcript generated by a computer.  As such, it may contain misspelling, inaccurate punctuations, or typos. Thank you for your understanding.

Christine Moore

Empathy just increased across the board whether it's through companies through individuals etc. And I feel like, in order to be a really good marketing procurement leader, you need to kind of be well-rounded.

 Magid Souhami

I'm Magid Souhami homegrown marketing procurement leader who turns president of a global business. Marketing procurement has gone mainstream but remains unchartered, misunderstood, and sometimes undervalued. This podcast ends at better codifying marketing procurement. 

Welcome to the marketing procurement podcast. Today I have the pleasure to have as a guest, Christy Moore who is FirmDecisions managing director  North America and who agreed to come and share with us a bit of her experience around interacting with marketing procurement. Hello, Christine.

Christine Moore

Bonjour How are you?

Magid Souhami

Bonjour, good, good. And you? We will have the episode in English, even though I'm sure that French will make for a great episode at some point.

Christine Moore

It probably would.

Magid Souhami

What I would love to start with is giving you the opportunity to introduce yourself and share a bit about yourself and your background with our audience.

Christine Moore

I've pretty much spent most of my working life post-MBA in the procurement space, both direct and indirect. And I have done that both on the client-side consulting side and agency side. So that kind of gives you a good background of my kind of professional life. In terms of where I come from. I'm a homegrown Swede, I've been told I have an accent. And I spent my high school years in Luxembourg. Thus the French and my college years in Danemark and I will not to refer what I learn in Danemark and in general, I've developed a very kind of curiosity. I have also become very resourceful in my life because I've had to kind of adapt to new situations. I love collaboration in all its forms, a good kind of brainstorm session, it's great too I love it. And it's not very common for financial procurement analytical people to like that, but I've kind of managed to massage both sides of my brain there, something a lot of people don't know about me is that I have huge empathy, it's kind of come out and lock your COVID I've done a lot of volunteering and helping out. And that's really been like a new area of my life, which is really developed a much more three-sixty personality, I love to run, I love kickboxing. And this will tell you a lot about myself, I have not been able to adopt yoga, or meditation. And I probably tried for at least five seconds. So that told you a lot about my personality. I like being able to move to have things happen and learning new things and helping people get better at whatever it is that we do together.

Magid Souhami

Excellent. Thank you very much for sharing all of that wonderful background. What I would love to hear your thoughts is: In terms of your background, interacting with marketing procurement, which is the core of our audience, together with agencies and the broader marketing family, how would you describe your interactions and the path that led you there.

Christine Moore

So I started post-MBA, before that I was in banking, and like everybody else, I wanted to move into something else. So I joined a consulting company that was very focused on procurement, helping global clients work out their direct side spends, so doing spend analysis, you know, the usual kind of procurement stuff. And what we did was a lot of pricing validation of vendors. So we would go out to the factories and find variances in pricing versus actual production cost. And then we would actually help the client negotiate a reduction, whether it was pricing, increase in value, payment terms, etc, to really increase the value for the client-side to deliver that and it was very fact-based, you know. You could count how many people on a production line etc. So I learned Procurement there. From there, I joined PepsiCo, so on the client-side, which was one of our clients, and it was in marketing procurement group. And so the first role I got was, where I managed to interview for and to be awarded to was the US creative agencies. So I managed the entire thing and I had never bought marketing in my life. I kind of enjoyed the TV type thing, right? Yeah. So it's certainly not the planned move. And I remember telling them that like, hey, do you know I've never done this job and they kind of didn't comment on it. Luckily for me, because I loved it. But so my first project was to lead a benchmarking study of fees across all the agencies that I was responsible for. This was, I thought, very much up my alley. Rating differences and negotiated for me was quite easy. And I remember getting the results. And the main argument of my story was, hey, we found that other clients pay less for similar services. So why don't you just lower my fees, and coming from direct to indirect and marketing, specifically, that argument is a very hard argument to make, in my opinion? But the project was extremely successful, we did get the rates down. And I've thought how come that was, but this was in 2008. So procurement wasn't really that common. I came with the logo of PepsiCo on my back, call it a billion dollars spent. So no agency probably wanted to take the fight. And they had an internal discussion and probably agreed, hey, let's just take a haircut here and be done with it. So I thought that was very interesting in terms of learning how procurement worked. And once I finished that project, because I had so much global experience, I was moved over to the non us business, which was half a billion dollars. And I was so surprised by the level of collaboration within that field, the marketing people invited me in as coming from procurement, you know, the minute they wanted to do something with a new agency, or change their relationship, the agencies weren't involved all the time. So it was really such a different work environment. And because we all realized, you know, everybody kind of brought something to the table, and we had to work together to find a workable solution, whether it was price or quality, value, innovation, whatever the goals were right. And that was really the most fun I've had in marketing procurement, because I was considered a peer of the group, not an afterthought. And that was very important to me.

Magid Souhami

One thing that I like to drill down on, let's start there, because it's the case for many members in the marketing procurement community, they come just like you and I, from the direct space, very organized from factories to creative agencies, there is a universe. So I'd love you to share a bit more of your first impression when you had this first experience moving from one world to the other, and maybe your key learnings or take away from that shift.

Christine Moore

I remember when I interviewed at Pepsi for this role, I kept saying, you know, I know it's indirect, I come from direct, but here are 82 reasons why direct and indirect are similar. And nobody really bought it, which was quite interesting. Maybe I should have listened, then, you know, I wouldn't be here. But I still am of the believes that a lot of the procurement process, the tools, the guidance, the analytics, the thought process, all of that is similar on the direct side and work on the indirect side. It is true. And that aside, you're not buying commodities, but there's a lot of direct spend that is not commodities, either. And it's not always based on volume. So I do think there's a lot of these learnings that are transferable, I think, with marketing, it's such a complex world, and we're making it more complex, everybody's trying to find for the new dollars that come into the marketing within different media, different types of agencies, martech, whatever it is. So there's a big learning on the business side and the marketing side, which I'm not sure there is, if you want to call it just to be very stereotypical, oil or plastic or whatever it is. But I think, you know, if you look at the number of cost drivers, they're similar, there's different kind of prioritization of the cost drivers, etc. But I do think we're not allowing the direct procurement folks to actually utilize a lot of their skills because they're seen as not right for the marketing procurement. And I'm not necessarily a signatory to that.

Magid Souhami

And the other way around. It makes total sense. Now, it's maybe a side comment, but for my own experience, managing marketing and broadly indirect procurement organization are creating some of them. One of the challenges that is always there after 15+ years of existence of marketing procurement is the discussion about where do we get the skill set. Do direct procurement folks are fit for indirect slash marketing procurement roles and the other way around. Now, I'd love to touch on one thing that you shared that came in your introduction, the concept of empathy. I think there is something there that we can dig together because the marriage between the science, the structure that direct gives you plus a bit of the magic and party understanding feelings managing the relationship is really what matters to be managing successfully marketing procurement organization and the agency, what are your thoughts on that?

Christine Moore

So I've been thinking about this, and especially during COVID, I think we've seen empathy just increase across the board, whether it's through companies, through individuals, etc. And I feel like, in order to be a really good marketing procurement leader, you need to kind of be well-rounded. So if you look at the CFO profession, if you will, they used to be tactical cost management, folks, right? The professionals moved much more to the strategic CFO, valuable now and they're much more thoughts after in the market. And I think procurement has the same thing, you need to really go from just the standard procurement approaches and bring in what is it that makes everybody feel like a winner in this relationship? What can we all drive to create value, which price is part of a value, but it's not the only value. So I think that's really where you can see a lot of impact from the procurement folks to kind of use their empathy, to create Win-Win situations, not only think of their own goals, because at the end of the day, you're trying to create a long term sustainable partnerships, right. You don't want to change agencies every year, or marketing partners every year you want to meet and work with them, establish a good relationship, and partnership to work within that. You don't necessarily want to just move on and trying to bit price. I mean, we know a lot of clients have tried that. And it didn't really work out that well for a long time.

Magid Souhami

Absolutely and the cost of change can be huge. So with your background in mind, can you please now share a bit more about your current relationship with the marketing procurement discipline?

Christine Moore

Sure. So actually, I was looking for a role where I could really use all of my backgrounds, so call it marketing procurement, agency side finance, and agency operations. And I looked at the kind of going pure play in a couple of them. And I was told I wasn't good enough in procurement. And in finance, I probably could have been good enough and operations don't really interesting. So I was looking for a role where I really wanted to combine all that. With FirmDecisions., It's really an area where you act as a middleman, call it that way, to really help the client-side marketing, procurement, deliver and make sure that the corporate governance and the good governance within the relationship is held up. So now my clients are pretty much all marketing procurement, I would say, there's some finance divisions, it's a very interesting space to be advising clients on how to make sure they get the best out of their relationship with their agencies. So right now, I think it's a great relationship. It's very insightful to me, and I think, so far, I've been managing to bring a lot of much more well-rounded conversations, as opposed to, hey, I want to monitor this company or this agency, because I think there's something going on.

Magid Souhami

I know FirmDecisions from past experiences, I'm sure many of the procurement folks or marketing folks know the company. But would you mind sharing at a high level? What FirmDecisions does and the type of client relationship you have?

Christine Moore

Sure, so we are a marketing audit compliance firm. So we help our clients ensure that their contractual obligations on both sides are met and delivered by the agencies they use: Media, Creative, PR, experiential, fieldforce, etc. So we really go in and look at what the contract asks of the agency. And then we go through the different areas and make sure that those deliveries have been met by the agency. And we work with pretty much 70% of the top 100 advertisers around the globe, what I've noticed is that we actually don't do all only big companies, we do a lot of smaller companies with much more diverse marketing spend. So even though the media audits and media relationships are the big-ticket items, there's a lot to be said, including good governance, as I call it within other categories of your agencies spend, as well. And we're a global company. We have offices in 14 markets with full-time staff, mostly auditors and finance, accounting educated staff.

Magid Souhami

Excellent, thank you for sharing that. What I love you to share now is based on those clients and companies that you advice, how does the interface with marketing procurement operates and or the broader marketing spend? So can you speak a bit about the recurrent topics that come, their concerns and priorities, the challenge that you hear most often?

Christine Moore

So we get a lot of questions right now about what should we do about 2020, right? so it was a year of complete panic for good reasons, changes, you know, you had media plans that have been very deliberately planned out. There was a whole upfront in the beginning, all of those things were most of the things just fell to the wayside. Clients had to expand from normal advertising plans to others, etc. So, coming back to empathy a lot of people feel like maybe we shouldn't rock the boat right now. And I think what we've heard is that and what we talk to clients is what you need to do, all of us have contracts in place. We don't put contracts in place for the good times contracts go into place for the times where we really are not sure what is guiding the relationship like crisis etc. And I think there were so many changes done within you know, you may have lowered your staff with the agency, the media spend went away, the media spend was directed elsewhere. Are you sure your media actually got aired? Was it at the right pricing, etc. So I think there's a lot to look into for 2020. Now, do you have to make it about I am going to pinch every penny out of a relationship that I have not at all. It's all about having good governance, as I keep talking about it's really do we all follow the law, which is the contract? Are we responsive to trying to find solutions? Are we held accountable for what we've said we're going to do? Or the new changes that we've done? Are we accountable for those, have they been written down for other people coming after us, or their transparency, and all of this, etc. So it really comes back to this full relationship. It's not all about, I think the agency did something wrong. So let's nail somebody, it's not at all about that. It's really about ensuring the relationship is good in all the call IT admin areas, so that we can all focusing in on doing great marketing, which both agency and the client wants, right. So we're hearing a lot on that. That's kind of the main thing. And also, a lot of new auditor auditing clients think of it more of as a one-off, where, again, coming back to good governance, you really want to have it go so that in the beginning of a relationship, you can sort out issues that aren't really following the process expected by the client or how they work things. And going forward, you make sure blips don't happen, client-side personnel, agency site personnel change all the time. If you have that current kind of check-in with each other, it's all good. And then you can focus on the real stuff that is important and that makes a good sustainable relationship. 

Magid Souhami

Excellent. We touched on a lot. Again, a very important point. And the bulk of our audience is both agency side and marketing procurement, and marketing folks. So I just love to pause and maybe deep dive a bit on the concept of relationship post-crisis. Because right now, it's the perfect time were going to the easy wrong, which would be darkroom, everybody hides behind contracts and goes into very positional discussion of who to blame, who did not deliver, and why we did not receive what was part of the contract and the scope of work. What would you share in terms of potential pitfall or advice for an agency and client-side to consider as they want to go and strengthen their relationship and going out of COVID period, even strengthen it to deliver bigger and better business results? Everybody knows there's

Christine Moore

Everybody knows there's been a crisis, obviously, and I don't feel like this is the time to bring out your contact and said, this is your fault. I don't think any company is looking for who to blame. We're way too busy sorting out, what does 2021 look like? Can it become a normal year, and financials looking at it from a financial perspective, nobody is going to come and say, Oh, you know, you didn't meet your operating target, because COVID hit. Now they're going to say if you miss the target by huge amounts, you should have done something. But I think most companies are given credit both to their agencies and to their own staff that we did what we could, as we learned about what was happening, I think is going to be much more important to take a step forward and learn together. What happened, what can we take out of this is my marketing plan, or my marketing strategy, now going back to as it was before, 2020. did we really catapult the online retailer experience, and now we're kind of never going to go back to the whole retail store concept. So I think it's much more important to come together on the strategic issues, which will also forge much stronger relationship, as opposed to hide behind the scene of Oh, the agency save money here. Or if you look at their holding company financial reports, some of them saved more money than they actually lost in revenue, etc. So you can totally go into the blame game, but I don't think anybody's gonna gain from that, and adding on the empathy we're seeing much more increased level of. So I think that's in the past, it was bad to be tactical. Now. It's going to be very counterproductive to be very tactical in that sense. If that makes sense.

Magid Souhami

It does make total sense. I just wish that what you share is what is going to happen. Because again, we're talking about human behavior and coming out of a crisis with heightened financial stress on the P&L for everybody, sluggish economic environment, and so on. My call to action for the marketing procurement folks that listen to the podcast is really help Stewart the right behavior. Short-term, tactical recovery of savings or money is one thing, and that might help. But that can be very counterproductive specifically in the agency world where you really need to foster a long-term relationship. So just keep that in mind. Everybody has different business dynamic, operating different industry, but that's just an advice that I would give to specifically the marketing procurement community.

Christine Moore

To build on that. I would say it's really about having the business mind in this time that we're finding ourselves in to deliver on all company goals. P&L is a strong company goal for most people. That's why we're mostly in business for everybody, but it's easy to be penny wise and pound foolish and you really don't want to shot yourself in the foot now and procurement needs to think a little bit more of the long game. Like you said, it's not about banking the back to this year. It's about playing the long game, the agencies are not dispensable, they're going to have a tonne of changing on their side too. And I hope that most sides like you will come out on top of it in better shape and form and doing better business. So that's what we have to do I think.

Magid Souhami

So on the core capabilities of FirmDecisions, what are actually the key areas if you can share, at a high level, that clients and or agencies are looking at, in terms of contracts, auditing, or really tracking what happened during COVID and making it better post COVID.

Christine Moore

Yeah. So what we've found, for example, is that a lot of client contracts are evergreens. And we've all heard this on marketing procurement. You have the Evergreen, and then that changes when you pitch your business usually right? And then you've got the scope of work that changes every year. And I mean, when I was a Pepsi, we were an Omnicom shop for a long long time, so that MSA didn't really change, right. And I think it's been neglected to update the MSS (the Master Service Agreement) during a continual relationship. Because all the important causes and all the kinds of changes in agency dynamics are regulated in the MSA. So if you don't change that, even thinking, well, a lot of clients now went from, you know, being high on TV, and maybe moving in modem and into digital. Now, if you don't have an up-to-date MSA, your digital span is pretty much gone, you have no idea what's going on, right. And traditionally, it's been an area of new business revenues for agencies, and the ecosystem hasn't really figured out where all the real costs are versus what you're paying is. So I think those things is really looking at your MSA on a more regular basis. And obviously, it's not going to sort out 2020 because it's been in place for 2020. But just going forward, you will learn that the MSA should be a lot more dynamic than what it has currently been. In terms of fees, for example, a lot of fees have an upside lock. So you can only charge up to a certain amount. But the downside is reconcilable so for example, with a lot of spends now that shifted or decreased, you can probably ask for a lot of money back. But is that really helpful because you were also taking up a lot of people's time from the agencies working on other businesses that you were trying to move forward with? And it wasn't in the same timeline. So there were more people on the account. So I think those areas are things I would look into in the US market. In the international is a little bit more on how much of the annual volume benefits that have happened around the world because most of them are set on volume, as the name indicates, have those been renegotiated? Should the clients have the right to get them back still? The contract says yes. So there's a lot of areas that are discussable and the client needs to really look into which ones are important. And the best way to do this is to do an audit or an inventory of what is the status and then together you can decide how you want to move forward. So I think information is knowledge, not power, but gives you the background and the information in order to decide your next steps. Just making them based on guidance or ideas is not good. So I think having the information before you make decisions is important.

Magid Souhami

Very helpful and insightful. Thank you. What I'd like to touch on now is you mentioned several time the concept of good governance. So if we put it back in the lens of the marketing procurement skillset, how would you describe the ideal marketing procurement leader.

Christine Moore

I almost see it as almost like the multiple dual degree type person because especially in marketing, it comes so much business sense into it, because all the marketing goals are driving sales, increasing brand value, etc. And if you just think about it, as procurement, you miss out on a lot of those other KPIs that are very important to your organization. It's really having that bigger picture seeing, there's the value, which we talked about before. But it's not only cost, it's not only about the P&L, it's about canceling out the noise in the system between marketing procurement and agencies to be able to just work on what all sides know the best, right? So we don't have to talk about the transparency and we don't have to talk about whether we follow the contract because we do, right, that's kind of put aside so we can focus on what's our real target audience? How can we get better data and analytics? How can we do all this knowing that we're all going to be responsive and transparent together because we have a contract that regulates it so that we don't have to worry that Paul is going to steal to pay Peter, etc? So that's really important for procurement leaders. I think it's important to show the value to marketing to be invited early. I think these days procurement is seen as a major partner. But I also know that in the past, procurement was always an afterthought. It's like, Oh, we need to sign this contract. We need procurement approval, and then procurement got thrown in, and I think being part of the process in the beginning, when you decide to go to a pitch or something is important, there's a lot of information procurement doesn't necessarily need. But hearing the full story is going to make them such a better valuable player on the team, that it's worth investing a couple of hours, listening to marketing, and seeing a nice flashy presentation. So the whole well-rounded understanding of business and driving value and helping to clean out the noise. Like I said, the elementary things that should happen because we signed a contract. And that's kind of what we do when we sign a contract. Right?

Magid Souhami

Very, very clear. Thank you. You describe on the position of procurement maybe a decade or plus ago, which was coming as an afterthought, after the discussion between marketing and their agency partner, for example. So you've been seeing the evolution from this point in time to date. What I'd love to pick your thoughts on is, what do you see as being next for marketing, procurement? 10 years forward where do you think the function ought to be or will be?

Christine Moore

I think marketing procurement should sit and live with marketing, almost like finance, marketing lives in that space. Right. What I did, I don't know where I got this from when I was a Pepsi, but we had separate offices, procurement was up in one location and all the marketing set down in the headquarters. And so I convinced my procurement boss that three days a week, I should sit down with the international marketing team in purchase New York. And just because it sounds so simple, because I could drop by their office, I could run into them in the food area, I could grab a coffee with them. It was just such an informal connection, that they would come up with projects and ideas. Oh, why don't you come along? So it's almost like trying to become a member of the marketing team, just like you're trying to become a member at your college or high school or whatever, and it takes effort, but we are playing in their field, right? When they see you as a valuable player, whether it's marketing insight, it's knowing people from the ANA conferences, it's bringing back research, information, and articles from what you hear in your network. It is all-important for the marketing and for the agency and I think bringing that to the table as opposed to being more of the policing afterthought is going to catapult marketing procurement into right and center. And I think that's where we will be 10 years from now because the ecosystem is getting so complex that it's very hard to understand the entire machine.

Magid Souhami

So I'm gonna ask you a very challenging question for the end, but it is just a way to open thoughts for the audience. If you think about the future of marketing programmatic will make an extension of agency partners in the ecosystem. How do you see it? Is that an obsolete bright future or anything in between?

Christine Moore

I think it's bright for the right people. I think the changing ecosystem which has been catapulted because of COVID will see a shakeout, some people may not have the interest to actually become really strong marketing procurement versus very strong indirect procurement. But the people that stay will be the ones that kind of operate with the two sides of the brain if you will. They will be good at marketing. They will be curious about the new trends, the new inventions the new ways of making money on the agency side, they will be open to having relationships on, you know, transparent rules and they will also be very good at procurement. So I think you're gonna see a newer breed. There's a lot of them right now in this space that are either high up or kind of in the middle to the senior level of government management that are going to be great leaders that are about to move into that kind of master puppeteer role where you really have the dual knowledge about both sides, and I think that's unique for Marketing procurement from other procurement categories.

Magid Souhami

Thank you so much, Christine, for finishing on this optimistic note but that is actually really realistic. So very happy to have you on the Marketing procurement podcast and really looking forward to the feedback or question or comments from our audience, based on today's conversation. Merci beaucoup, 

Christine Moore

Merci 

Magid Souhami

Hey, marketing procurement family. Thank you for tuning in and listening to this Episode. If you like it, give it five stars on Apple Podcast. We have another great episode coming up next week. So remember to subscribe and feel free to invite others to join our marketing procurement community. I look forward to seeing you again next week. In the meantime, take care of yourself and take care of each other.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai