Decideware

'Supplier relationship management is critical in the marketing category, with the key word being relationship. Ideally, enterprises want a very well-managed relationship with their marketing suppliers to ensure top quality and service.' (Source: Vishal Patel, Aberdeen Group)

In the recently released Aberdeen Group report, Marketing Materials and Services Spend, Getting More Bang for Buck, August 2007 the authors identify that:

• There is an opportunity for marketing and procurement to collaborate to achieve better performance for the enterprise from their marketing suppliers

• Marketers should focus on the 'relationship' with their marketing suppliers

• They should strongly consider deploying formal relationship assessment processes, and adopting assessment technologies tailored to address the specific requirements of marketing procurement.

Importantly, they note that Best-In-Class marketers are very significantly more likely to have standardized relationship management processes in place and to apply metrics across the marketing spend.

Some interesting quotes

‘Supplier performance measurement is clearly a procurement activity, however, since procurement’s influence over marketing spend has been limited in the past, a majority of enterprises do not measure the performance of their marketing suppliers.’

‘As shown in Figure 7, 70% of all other enterprises have no formal process for performance measurement, whereas, 29% of Best-In-Class have a standardized process …’

 ‘As procurement begins to better understand the marketing category, the dynamics behind ROI goals, and the importance of quality and service-levels, they will be able to improve their ability to measure these suppliers.’