How to Win Big at Category Planning
Time to take a step back, review the previous 12 months and plan for the year ahead. The decisions made now really are the cornerstone of the Procurement year to come, but how to win big? We’ve got a few tips to help you out:
- Stakeholder Alignment & Strategy – who do you need to take on your planning journey with you? Who from marketing and procurement is involved in what’s to come over the next year? Do you have their buy-in? Flock have run hundreds of stakeholder interviews across organisations to get the answers to these very questions – sometimes an external, objective conversation can really help get to the bottom of some of the deeper issues.
- How to track value? As you plan for the year ahead, what agreements have you made with finance to classify value and savings – soft versus hard?
- Sustainable procurement – when everything is running at a million miles an hour it can be hard to put the present to one side and focus on what the business will need in three years’ time. Ultimately this is your opportunity to put the future needs of the business to the fore – if not now, when? Demonstrate credibility.
- How does the big picture fit together? How are your agency resources performing? Have they been tracking against their KPIs? Are your teams satisfied with them and their working relationship? And the big question – do you need to pitch? Flock’s Marketing Procurement specialists with a depth of agency experience can advise you on pitch strategy, agency ecosystems and remuneration models.
We’d love to talk things over with you. Our door is always open, just drop Julie a note here and we’ll set you up for a coffee and a chat.