Quality vs. Price: Going Through Procurement

Power of Persuasion

Ideally, Meyer says, neither the meeting planner nor the procurement department should have the final say in vendor selection. “If anything, the meeting planner should have the power to veto any decision to go cheaper,” he says. “But generally, the procurement department and the meeting-planning department should be acting as a team, meeting together and discussing every bit. Then somebody at a senior level should be making the final decision. When you’re talking about meetings and events at this level, there’s a lot at stake. If it’s viewed as necessary to bring all these people together, then it needs to be done with attention to the larger goals and objectives of the company.”

Assuming that is the case, there are several tactics planners can use to give their favored vendors a better chance at being chosen.

First of all, remove as many hassles as possible and encourage vendors to prepare professional proposals. In Fox’s case, that means asking bidders to submit electronic documents. “They’re much easier to work with, in this day and age, than faxes or hard copies of documents,” she says. “It helps everyone, because we need to forward all our information to the procurement department, which is not in Minneapolis.”

If procurement wants a particular vendor, but the planner doesn’t think the vendor can deliver all the “intangibles,” the best strategy is to create an extremely detailed request for proposal so that the differences between the bidders will become apparent. “We work with [the procurement department] to go through the rationale of why we would select one over the other,” Fox says. “For the most part, we don’t get a lot of pushback. They’ll ask me to obtain three bids and attach my documentation of why I prefer one. It might not be the cheapest option, but they can see that I picked B versus A because of certain value-added points.”

Always encourage vendors to be as flexible as possible. Trembath says the Hilton doesn’t generally change the wording of its standard contracts, but for certain organizations, it’s willing to accept different terms.

“What we’ve done is actually developed a separate contract for [a large institutional client],” he says. “That way, it will speed through their legal process. We agree ahead of time on some of the contractual details that might otherwise hang things up.”

Most importantly, don’t view the procurement department as an adversary. It can actually be an ally. In many cases, executives have little idea of what meeting planners do for a living. By working with procurement departments—and therefore having to articulate and document the reasons for their purchasing decisions—meeting planners can shed light on exactly why they are valuable assets to the organization.