MENLO PARK, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Globality Inc., a global business-to-business marketplace that matches highly qualified small and midsize service providers with leading global corporations, today released its inaugural 2017 Marketing Procurement Report. It is based on a global survey that focused specifically on how procurement professionals, agencies and marketers can work together to grow and better meet business objectives.
Procurement teams are often prevented from acting as strategic partners to their marketing counterparts due to historically inefficient processes, inflexible decision-making criteria and corporate barriers that limit innovation – according to the 300 senior procurement professionals around the world who participated in the survey. This can lead to companies losing dollars on the top-line in exchange for saving pennies on the bottom line. Additionally, while mitigating risk and reducing costs are fundamental strengths of procurement teams, approximately 60 percent of respondents oversee less than 50 percent of all marketing purchases.
“Procurement professionals are uniquely positioned to drive business value, particularly given their eagle eye view into a number of business activities that many people within an organization don’t typically touch,” said Gabrielle Tenaglia, General Manager of Globality’s Marketing Sector. “Globality commissioned this survey to help marketers and procurement professionals realize the opportunity to collaboratively solve the pitfalls of the procurement process to ensure overall business success.”
Globality’s survey, released to coincide with ProcureCon Marketing 2017 in London, can be downloaded here. It has uncovered several processes within the procurement space that need to be streamlined in order to help companies be more agile, introduce more innovative strategic thinking and minimize risk.
Key findings:
- The marketing procurement process is far too slow for the pace of today’s digital business. Arriving at a short list of vendors takes between one and four months, according to 60 percent of companies surveyed. Another 20 percent of organizations take six months or longer.
- Digital’s rate of change and newness make it the hardest category to manage. 42 percent of respondents cite digital as the most challenging, followed by advertising, events and research.
- Pre-approved vendor lists should increase speed but instead impede innovation. 55 percent of procurement professionals work from pre-approved vendor lists, leaving challenger agencies locked out of the process.
- Long “short” lists mean many agencies are just cannon fodder in the RFP process. Over 25 percent of the respondents report that project shortlists include 6-10 providers, creating inefficiencies for procurement teams, agencies and marketing stakeholders.
- Procurement is spread across many categories, compounding the challenge of finding the right subject-matter expertise. For 72 percent of respondents, the marketing procurement team also gets involved in procuring legal services, and 56 percent are involved in management consulting services.
The data uncovers fundamental barriers on the operations side that stand in the way of allowing procurement teams to develop more strategic partnerships within a business. These poorly-structured operations create a supply-based procurement model where companies are required to choose from a limited list of providers – regardless of whether any of those options are the best possible match for a specific project. Today’s business climate requires a dramatic shift towards a demand-based model where procurement and marketing teams can forge partnerships that allow both sides to find the best suppliers for a given project, at the right time and in a precise location.
“While there are existing tools that offer help, and 70 percent of respondents from our report are already using one or more of these to accelerate the marketing procurement process, there is still vast room for growth; as well as untapped opportunity for procurement professionals, agencies and marketers alike,” said Daniel Kline, Senior Vice President of Global Sales at Globality. “The next step forward requires a new way of working, new technologies and new relationships – all of which Globality can provide by reinventing the traditional procurement process.”
Globality helps procurement teams modernize their processes and find the best service providers for each project, anywhere in the world. Globality combines deep industry knowledge and artificial intelligence to connect service buyers with trusted, pre-vetted service providers. By removing friction and adding smart automation, businesses can input their requirements onto Globality’s platform and be matched to service providers within days, versus weeks or even months, liberating procurement to focus on adding top-line revenue growth.
For more details and additional data about the survey, please visit solutions.globality.com/procurement-report. To connect with a sales expert and learn how Globality can improve your procurement process, visit www.globality.com/get-started.
Survey Methodology
This survey was sponsored by Globality; research was fielded by London-based Worldwide Business Research. Results are based on telephone interviews with 300 procurement leaders around the world representing a wide variety of industries, including financial services, manufacturing and retail. All respondents hold direct responsibility for marketing services procurement at companies with a minimum annual revenue of $1.28 billion (average revenues reported were $13.6 billion). Respondents by geographic region included Europe (98), North America (102) and Asia-Pacific (100).
About Globality
Globality’s mission is to make globalization work for more businesses and people around the world. Globality is a global business-to-business marketplace that gives small and midsize service providers the opportunity to work with leading corporations, and gives these large enterprises access to a pre-qualified network of best-in-class service providers, many of whom they would never otherwise discover.
Co-founded by seasoned entrepreneurs Joel Hyatt and Lior Delgo, Globality is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. The leadership team includes highly-regarded seasoned executives – Ran Harpaz, Chief Technology Officer; Porter Gale, Senior Vice President, Strategic Partnerships; Deborah Conrad, Chief Marketing + Revenue Officer; Erik Bardman, Chief Financial Officer; and York Poon, Chief Product Officer.
About Worldwide Business Research
Worldwide Business Research runs more than 80 industry-leading annual conferences globally, along with a full complement of content marketing services and intimate networking events, all aimed at educating, supporting and connecting the leadership of the world's core industries.