PREAMBLE
Magic & Logic
The Creative Challenge
Efficient Sourcing in Marketing
How Do You Support Marketing and Get a Grip on Agency Lifecycle Management?
Too Many Marketing Fingers in the Procurement Pie?
BONUS
David I becomes King of Scots. And while one could write a nice treatise about how he was a pious king, a reformer and civilizing agent in a barbarian nation and on the effects of his changes on Scottish cultural development, I’m not going to. (Wikipedia) There are full bodies of work out there you can read if you are interested.
The only reason SI is mentioning his royal coronation 890 years later is because he was the first to bring Scotland into the modern era. Despite the fact that it is England’s northern neighbour, the Scot’s didn’t have their own coinage until David’s reign, even though the Celts (which immigrated from Northern France) were producing coins as early as 80 BC and the Anglo-Saxons, after the departure of the Romans around 450 AD, began to produce their own coinage around 600 AD with the Viking colonization of the north-east of England (that minted coins in York). Charlemagne produced denier in the Kingdom of the Franks around 755 AD, and when Eadgar became king of England in 959, he introduced a silver penny that was used throughout the whole of England. But Scotland didn’t get their own coin for another 170 years!
The modern economy runs on the global banking system, which runs on banknotes, which was a replacement for the copper, silver, and gold coins that defined the monetary system of the time. This was an important first step in Scotland’s economic development, and a reminder of just how young our modern global economy really is when some places, known to be inhabited for millennia, didn’t even have coins a thousand years ago!
But the Scots learned fast. Now they are one of the most fiscally sound countries in Europe and even considering Independence in the fall (in a national referendum on September 18) as they believe they can do better economically on their own than as part of the UK!
Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Life is tough in Competitive Co. Global growth is slowing with the economy. Your products are no longer the most wanted in the marketplace. And at the end of every quarter, the employees who fall in the bottom 10% of their performance reviews get axed. Plus, you just found out that the CPO has been lured away to Big Money Co., one of the Directors is getting promoted, and it’s likely that the next Director will be promoted from within. You want that job, because it significantly decreases the chance that you will be cut when your next annual performance review comes up.
But how do you progress up the corporate ladder? Where do you focus your efforts? Even though you’re required to be a jack of all trades as a Category Manager, you can’t focus on everything, and if you’ll try, you’ll be a master of none and one of your category management rivals will be picked instead of you. Looking around, you see that people who get promoted to Senior Management positions tend to be those who either excel in timing the market and locking in contracts and/or spot buys at the perfect time, forging new markets, managing supplier relationships to optimize production, embedding themselves in standards organizations, or mastering the politics of the workplace to advance despite their lack of skills.
It’s not much different than trying to progress up the social ladder in the typical medieval village. If you were unhappy with the simple life of a farmer (like in Agricola) or a fisherman (like in Le Havre or Rouen Upon a Salty Ocean), then you either have to make your life as a merchant in the market and learn how to profit on every trade, travel to strange new lands to find new and valuable goods for trade, become a master craftsman and produce the ploughs and carriages needed by the farmers and traders, take the religious path and join the church and try to become a monk and work your way up the pecking order, or, if you were lucky to be living in one of the early commonwealths or states, where leaders were elected, become a politician and try to work your way up the ranks in the city council to eventually become elected (or appointed) as the representative of your city.
In other words, things haven’t changed much in 300 years. If you want to get ahead in the world, you either master trade, travel, craft, religion*, or politics. And that’s what you have to do in The Village.
In The Village, you win by controlling the family that achieves the most prestige by the end of the game. Prestige is gained by traveling to new cities, occupying the council chamber(s), progressing through the ranks in the church, succeeding in trade at the market, amassing wealth (in the form of gold coins), and getting your family members recorded in the village chronicle (for their deeds) on their demise. (Unlike the other worker-based games we have covered so far in this Board Gamer’s Guide to Supply Management, where you either have a constant number of workers, or a slowly increasing number of workers as the game progresses, in this game, you lose workers as the game progresses as actions have a time element, and you only get so much time per worker. This adds a new dimension of complexity as you have to be balance worker acquisition with worker loss, just like in the real world where workers retire, defect, or, occasionally, drop dead at their desks.)
As with most worker placement games, the game is round-based and each round consists of a number of actions. In each round, there are a fixed number of birthing, grain harvest, craft, market, travel, council, church, and well actions and players take turns until all the actions have been taken or the end-game has been triggered (in which case each player takes one more action). The birthing action adds one family member (worker) to your family; the grain harvest allows you to take 2 (3, or 4) bags of grain (if you have a plow and a orse or an ox); the craft action allows you to either produce or trade for a scroll, plow, or wagon, mill grain and sell it for gold, or work or trade for a horse or ox; the market action allows you to trade goods (and acquire prestige for your trading skills); the travel action allows you to visit a new city if you have a wagon and the resources to do so; the council action allows you to place a member in the council if you have a scroll or the influence (resources) to do so or, if you have a member in the council, advance him through the ranks if you have the scroll and/or influence (resources) to do so and gain rewards for doing so; the church allows you to enroll one of your family members in the clergy in the hopes that they will be selected for advancement at the end of the round (which will give you prestige if you have the most family members in the clergy); and the well action allows you to acquire a resource (needed for travelling, council advancement, goods, etc.).
The difficulty is in balancing your actions so that you always have the resources and time to advance. For instance, you can’t take too many time-based actions until you have expanded your family as you lose one family member after you have taken actions that require 10 time units in total, and, because this game takes place during the time of the plague, you cannot add more than 7 family members over the duration of the game. Many of the actions, such as travel, advancing through the council chamber, trading in the market, milling grain for gold, and working for scrolls, ploughs, wagons, horses, and oxen, require time. Depending on the action, it can require anywhere from one time unit (to enter the council chambers for the first time) to six time units to produce your first plough (as it takes 3 time units to learn the trade and 3 time units to build a plough). Just like in the real world, it takes time for your workers to learn their jobs and then time to produce results. That’s why you often buy or outsource, trading money and material (in The Village, resources) for goods and services you need instead of trying to acquire the talent and build the product yourself. Some competencies (like category management) you invest in and others (like production) you outsource. Sometimes you keep a superstar on your team, and advance them through the ranks (like you advance them through the council or the church in The Village) and sometimes you let them go (or, in The Village, let them expire to be recorded in the Chronicle for prestige).
It’s another great game for testing your Supply Management muster, with the unique twist that you not only have to balance resources with growth, but you also have to balance trade with workforce output, because, just like in real life, if you burn out your workforce, they expire. Do you have what it takes to be master of The Village. Why don’t you find out? Maybe you’ll even figure out where to focus your efforts to advance your own Supply Management Career!
* Some standards have as many zealots as recognized religions!
Let’s face it. If Marketing hasn’t let you put your fingers in the Marketing Procurement Pie, then you don’t have any experience executing and managing Marketing and Agency projects in your organization. Furthermore, given the more traditional role of Procurement and Supply Management, all of the training and expertise that has been imparted to you has probably focussed on direct and indirect materials management, and not ephemeral creative services.
If you want to be taken seriously, you have to not only be an expert in your function, but very knowledgeable in the Marketing function as well. You have to know their process, KPIs, and lingo and speak it like a pro. Otherwise, you look like a n00b in a l33tsp34k forum, and you won’t be taken seriously.
If you don’t make the cut, then you better bring in help, get up to snuff, and make sure you are putting your best foot forward before taking on your first Marketing Procurement project. As per our previous post in this series, you will be put on probation and likely only get one chance to succeed. Fail on even one task, and you’ll be blamed for everything and not allowed back in until there is a change in leadership. (It’s harsh, but you need to remember where the biggest concentration of egos typically are outside of the C-Suite.)
A third-party experienced in marketing procurement can not only help you understand the lingo, the relevant KPIs from a Marketing viewpoint, and the process customizations that are likely to get Marketing’s attention, but can also help you with:
For more information on what a third party can bring to the table, check out Source One Management Services’ new white-paper on “Fueling Effective Collaboration: How Strategic Sourcing Delivers Results for Marketing Groups”. There aren’t many resources out there on Strategic Sourcing for Procurement (and SI knows this as it’s been talking about the importance thereof since it started back in 2006), so take advantage of what there is when something comes your way.
Once you get Marketing’s attention, you’ll probably be put on probation. Just because the CFO views you positively because you are helping the organization identify 5% to 20% savings annually in every category you touch, this doesn’t mean Marketing does — even if Marketing acknowledges that they need to get their spend under control and deliver more value. So you’ll be given permission to help with one or two “pilot” projects, and if you want to get on Marketing’s good side and take back the Procurement Pie, you will have to succeed and impress. This sounds easy enough, since you already have a standard five/six/seven step sourcing process which is generic enough to be applied everywhere, but, as always, the devil is in the details! Unlike most indirect purchases, it’s not as easy as searching a database or sending out a Request for Interest. Different agencies have different strengths, and different capabilities. Some can manage third party production houses, some can’t, for example. You need to have a firm understanding of what Marketing needs to help identify the right agencies. Second, evaluating an agency pitch is not like evaluating a physical product or manufacturing plant. What are you looking for, and what aren’t you looking for. Again, you need to have a firm understanding of what Marketing needs and a solid understanding of the lingo used by the Agencies as well as Marketing.
And you need to present Marketing with a clear picture of the process you are going to follow up-front and make sure that Marketing understands the process you are using and the critical importance of not circumventing the process, no matter how many times the incumbent Agency representative uses his direct-dial rolodex and asks someone in Marketing to let a requirement slide or just skip straight to the pitch. To get Marketing’s commitment, the process should look like it has been customized to them and use terminology they understand. If you need a good starting point, a recent paper by Source One Management Services, LLC. has a great process graphic you can use in their recent Marketing Insight Report on “Fueling Effective Collaboration: How Strategic Sourcing Delivers Results for Marketing Groups”.
Be sure to pay special attention to the following tasks:
While you won’t be thanked for your many successes, even though proper benchmarking and reporting will have you recognized by the CFO and CEO, you will get all the blame for any and all failures if you screw up just once.