Hiring vendors: It’s certainly not a sexy PR topic like crisis management or social media. Whether it’s the need for Web development, printers, media buyers, custom publishers, back-end PR technology or videographers, securing the right vendors is important to the success of any PR team or organization.
Given the state of the economy in the last few years, taking a closer look at your organization’s vendor procurement process can’t hurt, and its something that Michael McDougall, VP of corporate communications and public affairs at Rochester, N.Y.-based Bausch + Lomb, has been focusing on just within the last few months.
VENDOR TRAITS
“One area we’ve been discussing internally is for vendors to operate globally, just as multinationals need to do,” says McDougall. “We’ve had some difficulties with PR industry vendors being geographic-centric, whether monitoring services, agencies or others.”
McDougall cites the example of negotiating with one vendor that claimed to be global, yet “its headquarters had no visibility into what other offices were doing around the world,” he says. “In theory, there’s many global agencies, but when you push you can see the gaps.”
Speed is another vendor factor that McDougall is taking under consideration. “Considering how fast things are moving these days, the ability to get vendors to move quickly is an issue,” he says. “Before it was ‘come back in a week with a solution,’ and now it’s ‘get back to me this evening.’”
For Lisa Federle, director of operations at Deveney Communication in New Orleans, the most important vendor trait is how they match up with Deveney’s smallish, locally based culture. For example, Deveney excels in customer service, says Federle, so she looks for vendors with those same values.
“We look for vendors who are the same animal as us,” says Federle. “We are not part of a big agency network, so we try to go with smaller, local vendors because they know how we work.” In addition, Federle says it’s better when vendors are close by because of the benefits of one-on-one interaction.
Even McDougall, whose company boasts 13,000 employees worldwide, considers vendors with small footprints. “We have some very small, creative shops—with no more than four or five people—that produce our program materials,” he says. Once again, speed is an issue. “They can turn the work around on a dime.”
McDougall sums up his selection process as follows:
1. Understand exactly what job is to be done and what will be required of the vendor. “There are times when these aren’t clearly defined, and that can ruin a vendor relationship in a heartbeat,” says McDougall.
2. Make a short list of those vendors that you think can do the work. “We used to use ratings from companies like Gartner, but now everyone is rated, and usually pretty favorably,” he says. Now McDougall uses recommendations from his PR peers as a barometer.
3. If you have the time, send out an RFP to those on the short list. “Then cut the list down to two or three, then ask specifically about pricing.”
Because of Bausch + Lomb’s size, McDougall sometimes works with its central purchasing and procurement department on major jobs. “With most PR vendors, you’re not buying a commodity,” he says. “There might be a good reason why Company A prices differently than Company B, and you have to explain that to purchasing.”
RFPs: FOR AND AGAINST
While McDougall often writes requests for proposals for his vendor searches, it’s a practice that has its pros and cons. Federle is not a big believer in RFPs, but a lot of that has to do with her agency’s size and culture. “I’ve always thought of RFPs as a cattle call,” she says. Besides, Federle believes that the RFP process encourages some vendors to bid low to win a project, and then count on getting the work and the price reevaluated once underway.
Tom Searcy, founder of sales consultancy Hunt Big Sales, says billions of dollars worth of work is generated each year from RFPs, and they are, for many executives, a necessary evil. In fact, the topic is so close to Searcy that he wrote a book called RFPs Suck! (Channel V, 2009) Searcy’s advice on writing effective RFPs is just as up front as his book’s title:
• Place the disqualifiers first in the RFP, “so vendors don’t waste their time filling them out,” he says.
• Don’t send out 50 RFPs, because you’re likely to get 30 back. “It’s like grading 30 freshman English papers—pure torture,” says Searcy.
• A good RFP is tightly focused on the job and its industry. “Instead of just asking for a vendor’s history, ask them to relate their history to their experience in working with PR,” says Searcy. (Speaking of questions, see the sidebar for some gems Searcy has sourced from real RFPs over the years.)
VENDOR CARE & FEEDING
According to both Federle and McDougall, it’s not always about bids when choosing vendors. “It’s really less about spec work and more about having the right experts at the table,” says McDougall. “A team that knows our business and the work well often trumps price.”
Besides, Federle says that by being honest with vendors up front, it can result in financial goodwill down the road. “If a vendor is good to me and has gone the extra mile before, I’ll throw in something extra in jobs down the line,” she says.
As for bad experiences with vendors, Federle says she works toward fixing problems when they crop up. “Make vendors aware of even minor hiccups, or of things they could have done better.” Federle suggests postmortems of campaigns and vendor performance.
If a vendor is not working out, McDougall advises meeting contractual obligations with the vendor while making sure another vendor is lined up to fill the gap. PRN
CONTACT:
Michael McDougall, [email protected]; Lisa Federle, [email protected]; Tom Searcy, [email protected].