What CPOs Look for When Hiring Global Marketing Services

Almost a decade ago, procurement teams were looking to gain more control over particular souring categories. But, things have changed now. The CPO or Chief Procurement Officer’s role with regard to value creation is so clear now that it influences many business units.

An increasing number of organizations are looking to hire procurement experts who can offer their skills in terms of category-specific practices or technological advantages since the average CPO actually provides value-based solutions.

One of the many areas that CPOs now have an impact on is translation and marketing. According to a recent study conducted by ProcureCon, 92% of CPOs in enterprise-level businesses have some level of control over the procurement of marketing and translation services.

To put it simply, CPOs can decide which translation service to hire.

A Deeper Look

Procurement is starting to play a much bigger role in facilitating the international marketing strategy across various organizations today. As the ProcureCon study pointed out, CPOs have a major role to play in making decisions regarding the procurement of marketing and translation services. In fact, more than 50% of the interviewed CPOs stated that they had a major role to play in such projects right from the start.

Needless to say, this has allowed CPOs to exploit better opportunities in terms of establishing long-term value unlike their role in the past, where it was mostly about cutting costs. In fact, procurement, back in the day, was the last consideration to be made in the decision-making process.

So, how exactly have things changed now?

Well, to understand this, we are going to look at the 3 most important considerations that CPOs make when choosing marketing and translation services that further larger organizational objectives. What we are going to look at is based on the ProcureCon study. The areas of consideration were ranked on a scale of 1-5 in terms of how important they were with respect to the purchasing of marketing and translation services.

1.) Quality: Respondents ranked quality as the most important attribute out of a list of 8 different attributes. 65% of the surveyed CPOs felt that quality was probably the most important attribute to be looked at while only 9% stated that they wouldn’t look at quality as a major attribute.

2.) Expertise: Expertise was ranked as another important attribute to be considered. In fact, it was ranked right behind quality. 46% of the surveyed CPOs stated that expertise in a given industry was the most important factor to be considered in making purchase decisions. Only 9% felt that expertise wasn’t a major attribute to be considered.

3.) Innovation: After expertise, it was innovation that was found to be a major consideration among CPOs. Though it does not rank as high as Expertise or Quality, a very small minority considered it as not being important while 40% remained unsure. In other words, there were more who agreed that innovation was important than those who did not.

Value > Cost

The study clearly shows that CPOs are all about value creation today. The very fact that the three highest-rated attributes have no association with the cost is evidence of this. Rather than cost, the preferred attributes have more to do with the reliability of the provider.

Of course, this does not mean that CPOs don’t consider cost at all. It’s just that they consider it as being less important than quality, expertise, or innovation.

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