Purchase marketing: a step towards innovation in your business

Purchase marketing: a step towards innovation in your business

Procurement marketing is about constantly exploring global supplier markets and finding new, innovative suppliers. In other words, procurement marketing focuses on identifying the best of the best.

Of course, the standard is an approved panel of qualified suppliers, which every company keeps an eye on, as it can be one of the key sources of competitive advantage.

Promitea purchasing software offers contracting authorities the possibility to create their own database for generating and managing an unlimited number of suppliers and their data. This database is naturally integrated with the suppliers in your ERP system, ensuring that sensitive data is not accessed by anyone other than approved suppliers.

Another popular purchasing marketing tool is the supplier catalogue, which is provided directly by the software supplier. However, you need to be very cautious when using it, because most of the purchasing software providers charge you for consulting the catalogue, so instead of the best ones you have a catalogue of those willing to pay ... An alternative is commercial supplier databases, which are not limited to the Czech Republic, but to the whole world. With a simple click, the buyer then invites the supplier to tender. Unfortunately, experience shows that "blindly" approached, untested and unmotivated suppliers bring little added value to procurers in terms of innovative ideas, aggressive pricing and quality improvements.

To attract new suppliers, Promitea offers a unique module that has been known and widely used by contracting authorities for years. The contracting authority publishes (all) upcoming tenders with a brief description of the performance and a link to an easy registration for all new potential bidders on its website, on its profile or on platforms for placing requests for tenders. They then fill in a simple form to alert the purchaser (technical guarantor) that a new supplier might be interested in the tender. The supplier is then subjected to a basic qualification process according to internal regulations and if approved, the supplier is invited to tender and the procuring entity will initiate the communication with the supplier that is necessary for a meaningful commercial and technical bid. Only if the potential supplier is indeed successful does the second step follow, where the contracting authority conducts an in-depth qualification of the supplier and includes it in the panel of approved suppliers.

Procurement marketing is not only suitable for tenders where we already know the exact specification, but also for tenders preceded by an RFI (request for information), i.e. we want to first discuss our need with the market, get an overview of the situation, and only on the basis of this preliminary consultation prepare a technical specification.

It is a pity that such a transparent and at the same time extremely effective method of purchase marketing is implemented by only a few private contracting authorities in the Czech Republic. Some fear that by making their intentions public, they will reveal too many details to the competition. However, it is questionable whether this is a false fear, since the contract plan itself contains only a minimum of technical information, which the supplier will receive only after approval. On the contrary, we consider mindlessly clicking on unapproved contractors in a sort of database and sharing sensitive commercial data to be far more dangerous.

The advantages of this approach are motivated suppliers, two-stage qualification of suppliers and opening the tender to a truly broad portfolio of suppliers.

In conclusion, purchase marketing is just one of many tools to attract and retain attractive suppliers. Companies that want to have the best suppliers must gradually implement a supplier management system (SRM), but more on that next time.