Category Archives: Marketing

Maybe If Procurement Had Embraced Magic and Logic Decades Ago …

… it would not be in such dire straits today.

The Procurement Ledger recently ran an article on Agility with Purpose which ran an interview with Jeanette Hübsch, a Global Procurement Leader and Senior Consultant with Proxima, who said that in Marketing Procurement, agility isn’t just a buzzword—it’s a necessity because the landscape shifts constantly with evolving consumer trends, digital innovation, and now AI-driven content creation. Procurement must move beyond being a cost controller; it needs to be a business enabler, a partner, and a source of innovation. And she’s right.

But she goes on to say that in indirect procurement, disruptions don’t always look like delayed shipments—they might be sudden campaign pivots, regulatory changes, or shifting budgets. Agility means being able to respond without slowing the business down and to accomplish this her focus is on building an adaptable supplier ecosystem—trusted partners with modular contracts, alternative sourcing strategies, and the ability to flex with us. Strong relationships, clarity, and scenario planning make a big difference.

In other words, it seems that marketing has understood what Procurement needs, and has needed, for at least the last two decades, but yet it’s still the sacred cow in most organizations that Procurement is not allowed to touch (when Procurement should be designed around good strategies that come from good Marketing Provider Management) and be allowed to shoot any scared cow ready for pasture.

Thought leaders have been promoting the embracement of good procurement by Marketing and marketing flexibility by Procurement for at least two decades now (and we first started talking about it in our two-part piece on Magic and Logic [Part I and Part II] two decades ago), especially since Decideware (founded in 1999 in Australia), one of the leaders in Marketing Procurement Technology, was just starting to break into the North American market at that time.

And even if they were a little slow on the uptake, then it should have been adopted when some thought leaders tried to make it vogue in the mid 2010s. A decade ago I penned a two-part piece on what to do if Marketing Mayhem Got You Down? Maybe it’s time to master the Marketing Way (Part 1 and Part 2) and ran a two-part series by Brian Seipel (of Source One, which was acquired by Corcentric) on why you should Ditch the Pepsi Blues, Already: Become a Marketing Procurement Asset (Part I and Part II). By then Decideware was taking marketing magic to a whole new level, but still marketing procurement (and the best practices it could bring) was still being largely ignored, even when marketing needed procurement more than ever. (In fact, Marketing recognition of Procurement wasn’t until mid 2019, and within a year COVID had shut everything down.)

While marketing suppliers (i.e. advertising agencies) are often very different from custom manufactured part suppliers (i.e. factories), and the categories need to be managed differently because of that, in a world where supply chains are being broken daily by geopolitics, unrest, and natural disasters, both require agility, creativity, multiple relationships and multi-sourcing, risk monitoring, mitigation, and management, and the ability to react as needed. The underlying best practices required by both sides are similar in theory and the lessons each side can teach the other can make both sides stronger.

So, if you want to be a better Procurement Pro, think like a Marketer, and if you truly want to be an effective Marketer, include some Procurement thinking. (And read the full interview with Jeanette Hübsch.) Remember that value has a cost side as well as a revenue side and both parties MUST manage both.

Dear Enterprise Software Vendor: Should You Fire Your PR and Marketing?

Note the Sourcing Innovation Editorial Disclaimers and note this is a very opinionated rant!  Your mileage will vary!  (And not about any firm in particular, as a few non-isolated incidents opened up a whole new line of questioning.)

In response to a post by eCornell (which is/was here), THE REVELATOR wrote this comment (which is/was here) which is repeated here in its entirety in case it gets deleted, since anytime we tried to have a serious conversation around sales, marketing, public relations, and/or Gen-AI with Big X firms and/or (mid-sized) consultancies and analyst firms, they have quickly deleted our comments, and sometimes their entire posts rather than enter into a real conversation on the subject (and now we have developed an implicit distrust any corporate account and keep copies of everything):

NOTE: The following post was inspired by a comment by Paul Rogers

Despite feeling like someone walking the hallowed halls of Cornell University wearing a “Yeah, Harvard University” t-shirt, sometimes you have to say things that need to be said – which is the purpose of sharing this article.

Ask ChatGPT the following two questions:

? What is the role of the Public Relations professional?
? What is the role of the Marketing professional?

Do you see any mention of end client or customer success as a priority? Whose best interests are PR and marketing professionals focused on? What does the answer to these questions tell you?

Corporate communication has always been about putting a positive spin on business and the brand. It reminds me of the 1986 Richard Gere movie Power – if not a great movie, it is certainly interesting and engaging. Denzel Washington’s role as public relations expert Arnold Billings is worth the price of admission alone.

Unfortunately, beyond the company they represent, are PR and marketing people doing more harm than good?

Thoughts?

To which the doctor responded (which is/was here)

Well, SI, which has repeatedly told companies in our space to fire their PR firms going back to 2008: Blogger Relations, firmly believes that PR firms are doing more harm than good because

  1. you are NOT selling enterprise software to consumers and
  2. it’s not “image”, it’s “solution”!

As for marketing, corporate marketing can be good if it exists to educate and explain, but when was the last time that happened on a regular basis in our space? Over a decade ago … now it’s all AI-this, orchestrate-that, and whatever the bullcr@p of the day is. It’s all buzz, no honey. All show, no substance. All confusion, no clarity. (It’s bad enough that Trump has brought back the Land of Confusion with his populist politics that have taken by storm the first world over, we don’t need it in our workplace!)

So, right now, I’d say at least 6/7, if not 9/10, marketers are doing more harm than good and should be fired with their PR brethren.

There are over 666 companies in our space, and way too many pandering any type of solution you can think of. While we need at least 3-5 in each industry group – market size – geo region – module focus you can think of for competition, we don’t need 30+. Most are not going to survive, especially when most of these don’t have solid solutions built from years of experience that solve real customer problems (as opposed to just offering some shiny new tech that looks good but doesn’t solve the majority of pain points in real organizations).

This means that companies need to focus less on marketing and selling and more on:

  • market research, especially listening to what the real pain points are of the customers they want to sell to (and they need to focus in on a customer group here, you can’t be everything to everyone in our space and any company that thinks it can is the first company you should walk away from)
  • solution (not product) development — not shiny new tech, tried-and-true tech that works
  • market education, explaining what they do, how they do it, and why it solves real pain points after building a solution that solves the pain points they identified in their research

Which means, especially if money is tight, they should forget the marketers and instead focus on hiring researchers and educators. People are getting tired of the 80%+ tech project failure rates. They’d welcome some real insight and real focus on real solutions. If only the market would wake up and realize this!

Dear Marketer On a Budget …

It’s never quantity, it’s quality.

And audience matters!

  • The majority of people who follow a celebrity aren’t following because they want pitches.
  • The majority of people who follow a major influencer aren’t following because they jive with that influencer.
  • And those that follow a minor influencer are following for a reason and are generally of a certain consumer class (based on the common reason). Don’t ask a fashion influencer for low cost apparel to sell a high end luxury watch, and in our space, don’t ask an influencer whose only use for tech is to make brainless content for followers to consume to sell an enterprise product.

These are hard truths that have been the case since even before influencers, so the following linked post from Phoebe Sophia Russell from “In the Style” (on how 150,000 on a celebrity Instagram post only produced $800 in sales) didn’t surprise me. It’s like the new startup that forks over 100K for a big bash at ISM only to come back surprised when they didn’t even manage to get a single follow up demo scheduled.

Think back to the days when Oracle, SAP and IBM (and almost no one else) used to advertise everywhere, but see almost nothing for their stadium sponsorships, airline magazine ads, etc. All it bought them was name recognition — which was important IF you could get in front of a client who’d seen your business name (repeatedly) and not your competitors (and then instinctively thought of your company as successful), but they still had to get those RFPs and meetings, which means investing in traditional sales channels that would enable that. But that’s not a strategy the vast majority of companies can afford!

SI, which has been giving away free marketing advice (including great advice from Pinky and the Brain#) since it began (because ??? ?????? has no intention of being a marketer … but still knows what works*), including this piece on Marketing 101 which appeared with the FAQ in 2007, always advocated for intelligent spending for smaller companies which focussed on publications (on & offline), events, and thought leaders who had the necessary audience, even if it was small. 100 buyers who actually want the type of products covered by the publications, events, and thought leaders is better than 100,000 individuals who have zero interest.

And the good news is that, even though many marketers during the heyday of free money would say I was off my rocker, the best marketers today pretty much agree with me, include the Marketing Maven Sarah Scudder who has teamed up with Dr. Elouise Epstein (in their DualSource Discourse podcast) to help educate you.

(Which is great since there aren’t many of us left trying to … going back to when I started, it’s just Jason Busch, Jon W. Hansen, Peter Smith, and Pete Loughlin who haven’t given up. Fortunately, we were joined by Kelly Barner and Philip Ideson of Art of Procurement and now we have David Loseby, Tom Mills, Joël Collin-Demers, and James Meads as well … )

Focus, Audience, and Education matter!

* Every single sponsor of SI before ??? ?????? joined Spend Matters in ’16 (to ’22) [and suspended sponsorships] was acquired by ’19.

# The Brain Gives Pinky a Marketing Lesson
# Where Pinky and the brain devise a plan to market their strategy

The Procurement Space is Filled with Hogwash! It’s Time We Start Calling It Out!

Not that long ago, Jon THE REVELATOR noted that nothing matters more than getting your messaging right in an article over on LinkedIn. Quoting a piece from 2010 where, in the colliding worlds of traditional and social media, the line of distinction is not as clear. Even though there are no real technological boundaries to limit the number of blogs, websites, and news sites, it is only a matter of time before the over-abundance of writers will manifest itself in the form of Aldous Huxley’s greatest fear and lament that truth would somehow “be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.” If not irrelevance, then one of information overload.

His lament echos that of Sarah Scudder who notes to ProcureTech brands that when we look at your website, we have NO idea what you do. You confuse us and say the same thing as the other 23+ brands in your space. Your platform is AI enabled/AI backed/AI enhanced/AI driven but what problem are you going to solve for me?! That the majority of marketing is the exact same messaging with no actual meaning.

As a result of this, and THE REVELATOR‘s comments, the doctor was forced to note that he’s getting fed up with the use of the word “content“. The Oxford dictionary defines content as “information made available by a website or other electronic medium”.

The Oxford diction then defines information as “facts provided or learned”.

There are NO facts in most of the hogwash these marketers are pushing onto the market. Therefore it is NOT content. Let’s start calling it what it is: HOGWASH! (And refer to our recent piece where we demystify the marketing madness for you for some of the more common, and more egregious, examples of this Hogwash!)

Content must be informative (precisely what you sell, precisely what it does, precisely how it helps the customer, and precisely what results the customer will get). Otherwise, it’s just HOGWASH!

As the doctor has said before, there’s a reason SI hasn’t returned to sponsorships [yet] (and that the doctor hasn’t authored any public papers/books for anyone in quite a while) — and it’s because almost none of these companies truly care about their customers anymore, once they take the (Investor/Angel/VC/PE/Wall Street) money, it’s only “sell, sell, sell“).

(If these companies did care, they’d be lining up asking us for the EDUCATION the doctor and THE REVELATOR used to provide, that, in the doctor‘s case, helped every single sponsor get the exit they weren’t even necessarily looking for at the time … because, even if it sounds plain vanilla, there’s nothing [potential] customers value more than the education and insights they need to do their jobs that their employer, who cut the training budget years ago and used the bonus money for a defective “chat, j’ai pété”-bot, won’t provide).

So, dwelling on this, it leaves the doctor with a question. Should we start calling out ALL the HOGWASH as we see it? Could we even keep up? Or should we stick to the HOGWASH of the week?

Have We Been In The Dank Basement So Long That We Don’t Care If the Fish Stinks?

the doctor has to ask because when Jon The Revelator asked if you would eat a piece of fish that has been in your freezer for 10 years? 5 years? 1 year? not many of you spoke up and it seems you are quite okay with old, smelly fish, which, in this case was a metaphor for provider case studies, as this was a follow up to The Revelator‘s post that asked Should Solution Provider Case Studies Have a Best Before Date.

A question, which was in turn sparked from a comment by Duncan Jones to his preceding inquiry on what can 2005 tell us on why most AI initiatives fail in 2024, which is a question that was partially sparked off of a post the doctor himself made on how we need to hasten onshoring and nearshoring — the drivers will pound those who don’t into the ground! (Part 2).

While this sounds like a long, meandering, pointless introduction, it’s exactly the opposite. The purpose is to demonstrate that not only are many parts of Procurement and Supply Chain connected, but they are connected in complex ways that require sufficiently broad, as well as sufficiently deep, solutions that address the complexities being experienced by the organizations a vendor is trying to sell to.

Furthermore, this means that for an organization, or a consulting partner, to select the right solution, they need deep information on what the solution does, where it’s been used, and what it has been proven to do. Traditionally, this would mean that they would require product sheets and demos, customer references, and case studies to make a good decision.

However, centering in on this last requirement, not all case studies are created equal, and not all are even “case studies” at all. What once was the domain of third party analysts, consultants, and professors (who would do proper due diligence, data collection, and impartial write-ups for educational and investment purposes) has now become the domain of marketers who get happy customers, often still wearing the rose-coloured glasses that came free with the install, to tell a story that they write-up and promote using very little, and often unverified, data. Those are not useful at all. Furthermore, if you don’t know what version of the software, what stack the customer ran on, and/or, and sometimes most importantly, when the study was done (and the time period it was done over), is it even still relevant at all?

This prompted the critical question from The Revelator about whether or not studies should have a best before date. the doctor leans towards no on best before date, because just like different types of fish have a different shelf life, different case studies will have a different shelf life, but votes a most definite yes on a packaging date.

To elaborate on the comment he made when asked, the following is absolutely critical to be included in the case study:

  • when the case study was written (packaging date)
  • the time period it was over (processing dates)
  • the precise metrics that were tracked and how they were computed (labelling compliance)
  • the extent of organizational data that was used (ingredients)
    [as well as the full extent of data available (may contain)]
  • the products, and versions, that were used (processing)

In other words, a feel-good story with a few random numbers is not case study! (the doctor would say any marketer trying to pass such off as one should be ashamed, but any marketer who did would obviously be without shame, so there’s really no point in saying it.) A case study has rigour in definition, methodology, data collection, and exposition and contains all the information that would be needed if a third party wanted to repeat it. (The same way a scientific study provides enough detail for an independent team to verify it.) Anything less should be considered unacceptable.

And, most importantly, since business processes, products, systems, and stacks continually change, a study (processing) date and a publication (packaging) date MUST be included so that a buyer can make an informed decision as to whether that study is still relevant to them (as they decide just how much stink they are willing to tolerate).