Welcome to the Market.Sell.Win. podcast. Marketing and sales are the drivers for the success of any business endeavor, yet many people may not have the specific skill sets and processes to drive new business in the door.

The purpose of the Market.Sell.Win. podcast is to interview seasoned professionals, who provide our listeners with information and insights that help them develop or refine their marketing and sales processes.

At some point, every company has to outsource some of their marketing services. Are you really creating, designing, negotiating, producing, implementing, tracking, and following up on all of your creative marketing ideas or do other parties help out?

Probably.

That's where the concept of marketing procurement comes into play. Marketing procurement is the subtle art of sourcing, selecting, managing, and accounting for services provided by the third party companies we rely on to compliment our marketing and sales efforts.

Here are a few examples:

• Maybe you or your marketing/sales people have the seeds of a creative idea and you mock something up - but do you design it or do you use an "outside" designer or design firm?
• If it's a digital effort, do you actually do the code to your website, prepare all the digital outreach and then execute it across multiple platforms or do you hire someone else to do that?
• What about follow up on a marketing effort - reaching out to people who attended the event or webinar or received the digital or 3D marketing campaign materials - are you doing this in house or looking for someone else to assist?
• And how will you know if you're really getting value received from the agreement you entered into

In this episode, my guest Mark Hudson gives you a high speed version of his career history and takes you on a tour of what marketing procurement really means and how you should think about it. Marketing procurement is about building relationships to make sure that you get the biggest bang for your marketing buck.

In part 1 (our free segment) of our four part interview, Mark Hudson shares with us some of the guiding philosophies of great marketing procurement which include:

• Developing a long-term strategy both on which services you will outsource and what you want those relationships to look like
• Building trust with internal clients (managers, marketing/sales people, or high-level company decision makers)
• Developing a rapport with all parties (the outside provider and inside colleagues) to define your role to protect and improve the process
• Working toward mutually agreeable project targets
• Defining savings, efficiency, and value
• Strategic thinking about the relationships you have with your outsourced providers
• Learning how to tell the same story to different audiences in different ways for different purposes

If you want to learn more from Mark's experienced insights, future episodes in the premium section of our forthcoming website will include:

- Marketing procurement ABC's for marketers (finding the best value for your business) (episode 2)

- Insights on building a better proposal process for companies in need of outsourcing (episode 3)
- Defining a contract scoping process (what to look for in a vendor's brief and statement of work) (episode 4)

If you have suggestions for future episodes or questions regarding marketing or sales issues, please reach us at marketsellwin@gmail.com.