By Steven Cody/Peppercom
There's a new player in the lives of PR firms: the procurement manager. This individual is becoming increasingly high profile as we compete for large (and even medium-sized
accounts). Empowered by the corporation to negotiate the best possible financial arrangement, procurement managers bring with them a whole host of new, and sometimes strange,
questions. For example, when's the last time a prospect asked for the salaries of everyone who would be working on the account? Or how about sharing your profit margins? Or being
told you can forget about being reimbursed for travel back-and-forth to the client's headquarters?
Having dealt with several procurement officers, we believe the best advice is to:
- Try your best to educate them that buying PR services is not exactly the same as procuring office supplies. Happily, we have dealt with some enlightened individuals who
understand that strategic and creative services don't necessarily follow the economies of scale model. - Decide at the very onset whether this is a client you'd really like to represent.
- Decide how much financial information you wish to share. In one instance, we refused to provide salaries of the proposed account staffs. Instead, we provided hourly rate
ranges by job title. - Try to ensure that procurement will not be a barrier between your agency and the corporate decision-makers on the other end. We were involved in one pitch where our questions
had to be e-mailed to procurement execs. They, in turn, forwarded them to corporate communications. We then had to wait for the responses to come back to us through procurement.
No other contact was permitted.
Clearly, the procurement officer is here to stay. It is in our best interest to reach out whenever and wherever possible and educate these individuals about the nature of our
service. The more procurement understands the nuances of public relations, the less likely they are to confuse us with OfficeMax.