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Speaker/s name

Chris Marriott, Martina Lipp, Todd Leiser

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Panelists
Chris Marriott, President & Founder Email Connect
Martina Lipp, CRM and Growth Marketing Leader
Todd Leiser, Global Head CRM, Analytics and Marketing Tech Spartan Race

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https://vimeo.com/532438386

Transcript

Chris Marriott 0:45
Oh, there we go. All right we're all here Hello and welcome to the 2021 edition of mastering the ESP RFP where there was some confusion as to when we would start and when we end I hope to have that we have more than the half hour that we might only have and sooner we know that the better or we will pick up the pace but neither case we're I'm delighted you can join us and and join me and Todd and Martina on today's on this part of the presentation. And you know it mastering RP is is always important. Knowing how to conduct an RFP effectively is always important. This year, I think more so in that there's so many probably going to be so many more RFPs you have the impact of Oracle shutting bronto down, you have the impact of RFPs that were delayed from 2020 to this year. So again, I think there's a heightened attention to the need to do RFPs and the need to get it right. So let's talk let's let me introduce my guests. When I can change the There we go. So first, I wanted I want to have Todd lizer introduce himself time say hello to the crowd.

Todd Leiser 2:00
Yeah, hi. Yeah, good afternoon, spend a lot of time I run Global Head. I'm the Global Head of CRM, and analytics for Spartan Race. You may may know us as Spartan we also acquired tough mudder right prior to the pandemic. So we have a multiple brand global event business that covers over a million racers a year, ecommerce across the globe, as well as a content and sponsorship platform. So yeah, glad to be here today, Chris.

Chris Marriott 2:28
Great to have you Todd. And just FYI, Todd is actually a veteran of two RFPs with me at his previous company Rodale and at his current company Spartan He has lots of good insights to share and then Martina lip, please introduce yourself.

Martina Lipp 2:44
Yeah, Hey, everybody, this is Martina live. I've been in the CRM growth marketing space marketing space for going on 16 years now not to date myself. I've been leading CRM teams for a couple of different companies, different sizes, very often very high growth companies like mobile, and espresso, Dollar Shave Club, and then also Disney most recently, but Chris and I work together on an RFP for for Dollar Shave Club, which probably was one of my fourth or fifth RFP or implementation. So it was definitely a very exciting experience actually work with Chris on this one. So definitely a lot of good learnings.

Chris Marriott 3:22
Excellent. Well, thank you both for joining me today. I wanted to do just a very quick logo. Again, my experience in the RFP landscape has goes back 10 years, I've been working with leading brands on RFPs. These are some of the clients so what you're going to hear today are lessons learned from enterprise primarily enterprise RFPs, what they're applicable to those in the mid market and even some of the SMB space. So again, we hope everybody gets some value from today. So let's start with why is it so hard to master the RFP, the ESP RFP? First is there. Well, overall, it's full of landmines, there's so many mistakes you can make, right from the get go or throughout the process. First is they take up way too much time that most of us could be better use on our day jobs. They create or exacerbate tensions within your organisation, oftentimes, particularly between the marketing department and it who oftentimes have very, very different ideas of what a good fit looks like. They never ever, ever, ever end on time. Rather, they can drag out over months or even over over the course of a couple of years. It's increasingly difficult to discern actual differences between the various participants when you're when you're starting your RFP. Apparently everybody can do everything. And that's absolutely what you're going to be told by salespeople, God bless them, but they've never met a requirement that their platform wasn't ideal for And I think even more importantly, no one really knows what they should be putting into the requirements. They know what they like about what they with their current platform. They know what they don't like about their current platform. But let's face it, if you can three to five years between your, your last RFP and now, you may be it may be very unclear to you what's even possible these days. So you end up putting together the requirements document that still leaves that doesn't future proof you but rather leaves you with a platform that is that is not up to today's standards. And lastly, no one knows where the market is, in terms of pricing. What's a fair deal these days, vendors have gotten very good at changing their pricing models. Unfortunately, those models don't match one another. So one of the big challenges brands always find is how do they compare pricing between the various vendors that they're looking at. So I've got five tips today that Martina and and Todd are going to extrapolate on for mastering your email RFP, there are only five, but these are 515 good ones to start with. First, and I always tell this to clients, and if you've ever heard me speak before, you know, I always talk about this. And that's negotiate a contract extension with your vendor before starting the RFP. Why is it so important? As I said previously, it's going to take longer than you think. And if you if you leave yourself just enough time that you think it's going to take to pick a new vendor and migrate to a new platform, you're gonna, you're very likely going to find that you don't have enough time to do both those things. And that your existing vendor, particularly if they didn't win, the RFP isn't going to look very kindly on on that contract extension that you're going to get at the last minute. So we advise clients to go see if they can negotiate a month, a month, or three month extension, trust me, you're going to need that extension, it will never ever happen as fast as as you think it will. I mean, Todd, you I think you've got a good.

Todd Leiser 7:07
Yeah, I mean, the other thing I would add, Chris, is that if you don't negotiate with your existing vendor, even even if you intend to stay with that existing vendor, you lose all leverage in that in that renewal negotiation if you don't start this process, with ample time to move, right, so the only thing you put yourself on your back foot as far as overall negotiations if, if they know because they know it's going to take long to migrate you off. And if they've done an effective job, they're part of your business, they're a partner, not a vendor. Right? Right. So so I think you want to give yourself you know, minimally six months if not longer, to get yourself a contract and move your way out.

Chris Marriott 7:48
Martina, any you have any other tips in that regard?

Martina Lipp 7:51
Yeah, I will definitely second actually what both of you guys said it's always gonna take longer than you think it will. And definitely make sure that you have something in your back pocket. I think one thing to consider is also potentially including your existing ESB in the RFP, that might be another thing you might want to consider just to kind of keep a fair playing field.

Chris Marriott 8:12
That's a great point. And in fact, you know, in less than your relationship with your existing our ESP has completely broken down to my Tina's point, give them a fair shot, you want to compare them to the others you're looking at. And again, as long as they feel like they have a shot, you're gonna be, you're gonna continue to get great service. And again, to Todd's point, they're going to be amenable to the idea of a contract extension. The second day, don't believe they're going to keep your business. That's when troubles can start bringing in outside resources to help manage your RFP. Again, we're gonna do a deep dive into these so I won't. I won't ask questions on getting input from Todd or Matina. Each of these will take them individually. Use a scorecard to make your decisions for the right reasons, complete your RFP and come to a decision that one seems like such a dap. But we'll talk about that if you want you can say well, of course but that's not always how it happens. And lastly, understand what you absolutely need in your contract. And what you don't need to sweat there's things you should be sweating, and there's things you shouldn't be sweating. So we already discussed this negotiated contract extension and just remember I say a good rule of thumb is whatever you think it's going to take double it. And that's probably you know, even if, even if it even if you are doing everything right, and you're moving the RFP along, and I'll tell you something, Todd's last RFP with us and he and even Martinez RFP with us, both of them, were keeping the schedule, I allowed myself luxury of saying, you know what, these are actually going to end on time. thing happened a long time. What do you got for us? What what disrupted your most recent

Todd Leiser 9:58
you know, we had a couple of disruptions You know, one was, you know, inevitably Chris, Chris kept pushing towards, hey, let's get to six or seven companies, you know, let's kick kick the tires with them, let's go through this process, we ended up with, I think, nine or 10. Till we ended because, you know, the friend of a friend of a friend kept coming in the door CEO runs across a new vendor that he loves and gets, you know, gets a great pitch on. So you have that sort of effect where you're gonna end up maybe adding one or two companies vendors that surface that you didn't expect to include and maybe it's because it's, you know, the President or CEO demands it. The other ones COVID, right, we we were almost to the finish line, right prior to, you know, this pandemic hitting the fan. And so as a, as an event company that disrupted our entire, our entire process, which we then picked up midstream when we realised Hey, we're we're going to be shut down for a while. Perfect time for us to kind of bring it back. Let's get to the finish line work through that, you know, work through that. And we're in the midst of the implementation right now.

Chris Marriott 11:00
And and Martina, you had also an interesting when you were at the Dollar Shave Club, why do you tell us how that one sort of went off the rails at the end? I'm doing really that two second, let's let's talk about who was to blame for going off the rails.

Martina Lipp 11:22
So basically, what happened is, we went through the process, I think, actually everything moved along, as you said, pretty smoothly. I think one thing that obviously always complicates even the most objective and well planned process is the human factor, right? So I think that is actually I actually had another opportunity to join this case, Disney. And fortunately, and I actually felt I left the we had a winner, we had a clear on two winners that she wanted to put into the sandbox environment. And I think we actually had a clear understanding of where we want to go. And then after I left, obviously, things did not work as planned. We have new people coming into the end of the company that actually had different opinions. I think Chris kind of had to like Shepherd things along in where we actually felt we already had made the decision. So I think that was definitely, I would say pretty interesting learning. So yeah,

Chris Marriott 12:17
you were on a homegrown, which we'll talk about in a few not exactly later, you could they were willing to negotiate an extension, because they. The next one is bringing an outside resource. And again, this sounds self serving, because that's what we do. But we're not the only outside resource there is. And the reason you want to do this is I mean, there's several good reasons. One is, again, as I said, you have a day job. And if you're going to possibly keep an RFP on track, having somebody dedicated to the process is the best way to at least hopefully keep it on track. You know, we always bring in a project manager, who we call our air traffic controller, who manages the process between the vendors and our clients, again, allowing them to spend as much time as possible on their day job. But potentially even more important is the vendor landscape is more confusing and complex than I've ever seen it in the last 20 1520 years. And it gets more confusing and complex all the time. Today's presentation isn't what what is that you know, what makes it so confusing. We could spend a whole hour on that. But the reality is, it is more confusing and complex. And again, it's not your job, the brand to stay on top of the vendor landscape, you don't really think about it, just like you don't think about insurance and you need it, you don't think about the vendor landscape, so you need it. But there's people out there whose job it is to is to understand the vendor landscape. And to help brands because the one landmine that can absolutely blow up an RFP out of the gate is inviting the wrong set of vendors to pitch your business. And again, that's where a consultant or an outside resource can make sure you're only looking at those espys that if they wonder business would one your business would be a good fit. And I've seen again where where where they're they get down to the Final Four brands will get down on the Final Four. And they realise none of them are right. And and and you know they'll have to restart and again, nobody wants to you know, redo an RFP. So that's another important reason pricing, as we mentioned, I'll mention later is is another one where again, you can count on an outside resource to help you through that. Oh, and here's some of the points I was making. Again, the pricing models, more diverse changes in the landscape, and the much different differences between the espys Martina or Todd, do you have anything to add in terms of since you both use an outside resource?

Martina Lipp 14:44
Yeah, let me get started on this one. So yeah, I think for us, specifically the situation we were in at Dollar Shave Club was really interesting because we were in this unique positions where we actually had a homegrown ESB, that actually was actually very, very It was a great tool, right? But we started actually reach the limit of it right? So for us the decision was, do we want to invest for technology resources into actually expanding and building out that existing proprietary ESB? Or do we actually look for something that is a bit off the shelf that actually is already out there? And there were obviously I think one factor you always want to keep in mind is that there's obviously, and I think you mentioned that Chris, in the beginning like it and marketing might have different ideas. It was particularly interesting for us because obviously, there was a lot of sense of ownership pride on the IT team for us. So we want to be very careful and mindful of actually, people's sense of actually ownership and pride. So it's very good to bring in an outside resource to actually add this more objective layer. So it feels like everybody has a seat at the table, and has a say, and you can't be as objective as possible as you evaluate the different alternatives, but also actually our entire is because I think that was definitely very helpful having Chris on board to really mitigate that sense of bias that you sometimes could get in like a process that you actually, but either the marketing or the IT team managers, right, if you don't have a procurement team, so

Todd Leiser 16:14
yeah, I mean, I would echo that the neutrality that gets established by bringing in outside resources super helpful. You know, in that process, I mean, the challenge we face, right in this particular space, which has been predominantly email centric for many, many years, but that that change, as you alluded to Chris, right, the functionality and the changes in this landscape to expand what we think of as an ESP or CDP, right? You know, I think everybody sends emails, so everybody's an expert on emails in your organisation. The reality is, we don't know what we don't know, right? If you're sitting at your desk, and you're engaging in email as a user every day, you're not an email marketer, right? Or you're not an effective user of his platform. So I think bringing in that outside resources allows you to sort of really open up your eyes in the organisation, right? To create that neutrality and, you know, broaden the view and broaden the lens of what we think of these platforms.

Chris Marriott 17:08
Great, thank you, I'm gonna move it along just the interest of time. And, folks, if we have don't have a hard stop at 125, can you send us a note in the private chat, please. So this is I alluded to complexity in the vendor landscape. And this is just an example of how diverse the market is between the various types of DSPs. And again, I don't want to belabour this today in the interest of time, but again, it gives you some idea of how when you map them out, when I map them out, in terms of tech versus services, broader array of offering versus email only, you find that they're falling all over the place. So next one is use a scorecard. And this, Martina alluded to this earlier, when she said, You know, it's important to get input from every stakeholder. And using scorecards allows you to do exactly that. At each stage of the process. We use them in our RFPs. At the requirements slash RFP level, we use them at the in person presentation level, when we're we're looking at actually and this is this scorecard here is from the sandboxes. And that's from the in person presentation. And we use them in every stage, and they do a couple things. One is, again, if you're willing, as Martina said, if you're willing to fill out a scorecard and do the hard work, particularly the requirements scorecard, when you're scoring, eight to 10, vendors against 250 to 350 requirements, your voice deserves to be heard, and it's going to be heard. And another thing does, it leaves a paper trail, because I've seen RFPs. You know, I've seen RFPs up ended at the last moment, not ours, thank goodness, but I've seen but you know, talk to people where they were picking a vendor and the CEO who golf's with the CEO of the brands company, she says Why didn't you you know, why don't you guys pick my, our company? I'm your buddy. And the CEO comes down and says, Why didn't you and you know, that's when you want a paper trail? That's when you want to scorecards that says say why didn't we you can look at how everybody in the company scored your buddy's ESP against the one we picked. Now if you want to, if you want to us to go with an ESP that nobody in the company thinks is up to the task. Well, you're the CEO, obviously we probably none of us would probably actually say that to CEO but we'd be thinking that and again, good to have that paper trail. But also Martina in your case, again, we put the homegrown platform because again, you're very proud of it. They should have been they built a great platform. It was amazing. But but but by putting that into the RFP as if it was an ESP and then having them score it and look how everyone else scored it. I think that made the final decision to move off of it much more palatable to your team.

Martina Lipp 20:03
Yeah. And I think it also helped us understand, actually, if we wanted to actually reach the level of the other esbs. It also was like a cost calculation behind obviously, if we had to go there, how many engineers? Would we need to actually work on that? And that I think intent really quickly became clear, it was not worth the investment to actually get to that level, right? So see if those of you that

Todd Leiser 20:28
you know, want to drive some people away from the table internally, right, people who had a strong voice or had an opinion, weren't committed to going through the process of evaluating up to 10 vendors across all these points, right, it means that that's a commitment of time in the RFP process and in those interview processes in those presentations, so drive some people away from the table, which is good. And then the second is it allowed us to bring the team together, right? So we had a tech team that had a very strong opinion about where we should be. And then we had marketing teams that had different opinions, right? And we had a CEO that was a little more like what you were saying, Chris would like, Hey, why don't you just go with this guy over here, because I, you know, I live I live near them. It allowed us to actually bring the teams together on the decision. So we were all making this decision together.

Chris Marriott 21:14
Right? It's hard to argue with numbers. And And again, that's why, you know, we feel so strongly, I feel so strongly that scorecards are the way to go. Come to the decision, as I said, believe it many don't. And oftentimes, everybody just sort of pretends that never happened. And, and, you know, I've seen cases where, you know, the vendor stopped calling the brand, kind of just, you know, put, you know, quietly goes off and signs, an extension. nobody wins. When you do that. Number one, the vendors have long memories, and they're going to remember that RFP that never finished next time, you may decide to run an RFP, and they're going to be a lot more leery of whether it's a business, they want to pitch. But it also leaves everybody demoralised, and with a vague feeling of why did we waste our time. So again, remember, if you start an RFP, you got to finish it, because again, there's a reason you started it. And that was to find a better partner. Don't lose sight of that fact, don't give up. And lastly, and then I want to get get some questions, some open ended questions to Tata, Martina, focus on what truly matters. And here's the big three limits on liability service level agreements, and the associated penalties and contract termination. Those are the what I see is the big three. And the reason why the big three is there will blow up in negotiation. So let's start limits on liability. Listen, liability is, you know, if there's a data breach, will what's the financial, you know, what, what's what are the financial penalties that may be assessed against the vendor? Well, as you can imagine, the vendors approach is, you know, starting at zero, and working up from there, and the brands approaches a quadrillion dollars and going down from there. So there there are 180 degrees different at the start of every new negotiation we do. And part again, here's an outside consultant as a referee who says, both sides are a little bit right can help you bridge the bridge those gaps because it can't be zero, and it can't be a quadrillion dollars. But it's got to be something that is severe enough that the vendor isn't going to, you know, is going to make sure that they don't breach but have a data breach or something. But also it's not going to bankrupt the company or be something their CFO says we can't sign up for that. So yeah, you got to bring them somewhere in but that one is the one I've seen blow up more contracts probably than anything else. service level agreements, you know, less severe here, it's, you know, what's the uptime? What's platform availability, what's the uptime? what's the what's the campaign turnaround, but these needs to be finalised early finalising I always tell my clients every promise made by sales guy during the RFP on on things about turnaround times or uptime write down and put it in a deck because if they say it, it ought to be in the contract and you got to hammer these things out and the associated penalties again this one is you know, I haven't seen a block of contract but I've seen it slow down a contract contract termination that's another one that that's number two in terms of blowing up deals lending some liability one contract termination to and what that is again, clients and vendors are diametrically opposed. I have diametrically opposing views. The vendors gonna say a three year contract is a three year contract. There you know, that's how long it's gonna last. The brand is going to lawyers are going to say we don't sign anything that keeps us committed forever. We need to have a 90 day out. The problem with that, again, I see it both sides. The problem with that is I know Add out to the vendor is a three month contract. And in reality, it is a three month contract. It's not a three year contract. So you know all the all of the concessions you're trying to get as a brand, upfront, normally their bean counters would say, well, we can amortise that over a three year contract. So yeah, we'll do migration for free, or we'll cut the costs in half, or we'll do whatever it might be to, you know, get the get it started, because we can amortise it over 36 months, well, we can't amortise it, if it's a 90 day out. I also understand brands legal saying we can't sign anything that we can't get out of. So again, there's there's ways to bring those two sides together, it can be penalties for early termination or whatnot. It's often hard to bring the two sides together. And again, that's where sort of a referee who understands what where both sides are coming from can help make sure the contract doesn't blow up. Martina, do you have anything to add to that? Yeah. And

Martina Lipp 25:58
I would say Actually, it's good to have someone on the altar actually on board, because then that person, she can play the bad cup. And we as a client can always be the good people. So I think you want to be mindful as you negotiate. You don't want to kind of destroy your Do we have any issue with your relationship? Right. So I think it's really good to actually have somebody who can kind of

Chris Marriott 26:24
connect, they're the ones that are unreasonable? Yeah. Okay, I can't do anything. There just be too unreasonable. What about you know,

Todd Leiser 26:32
I think that's exactly it. Because you really want that initial part, you know, I always refer to it as partnership as opposed to vendor relationship, because I've found that over the 20 plus years of doing this, that, you know, you do need to have a tight team established between your partner, and you know, your internal team, right. So you don't want to set it off on a bad, you know, bad foot. And I've never liked to pay upfront large expenses for bills, right? Because, you know, I love to amortise stuff over a long period of time.

Chris Marriott 27:00
Excellent. Excellent. Okay, now we're getting to, I'm going to skip that in in the interest of time, I don't know I don't I can't see an even private chat. Have

Martina Lipp 27:13
you have you have a hard stop at 155? Okay,

Chris Marriott 27:17
do we Alright, I'm sorry, then I can open up for questions. Because I want to get I want to have Todd and my team have the opportunity to answer at least some of these questions. So my team is starting with you. What was the most surprising thing that came out of your RFP process or processes? Since you've done more than one?

Martina Lipp 27:34
Yeah. Okay, I'm gonna keep it super brief. I think one thing you want to be mindful of is that certain if you peel back the layers, and that you really poke start poking holes, feature that actually might be called the same thing is not necessarily the same thing across different companies. So actually, a journey builder functionality might look very different in terms of technological maturity, with mom and then the other, even though they actually on paper. They sound the same. So I think one thing that's been done, it's definitely an issue for Kohl's and peel back the layers.

Chris Marriott 28:04
Great, I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna tag Kevin. Todd, do you think it's possible to change vendors without doing a full blown RFP and just look at a couple and make a good decision?

Todd Leiser 28:16
I mean, I think if you have all of your requirements fully documented, you understood the entire landscape of where you're going and what's out there, you might be able to do it. But I honestly don't believe many companies have the full view of the requirements document documented, and you know, there's going to be competition internally for a decision whether or not the decision is hey, we're just going to, you know, renew with the current or stick with our current platform. So I really do think an RP is a great roadmap forward living, if you stay with your current vendor has to Martina's point, it does allow you to set your priorities internally and understand your budget allocation for years to come. It's great

Chris Marriott 28:53
answer. Well, that's the clock that countdown clock. Alright, so in 30 seconds or less Martina, so Was there anything you could have done better to be better prepared for your RFP?

Martina Lipp 29:05
Um, I mean, I was handled learning from the previous lessons learned from the previous RFPs. I think a lot of things actually, we did better. I think one thing I would say is always like, never underestimate moments that really make people come on board and always plan additional path. I think that's really what it is. It's to your point, Chris, in the beginning, it always takes longer than you think it will.

Chris Marriott 29:27
Great answer. I wish we had more time. Todd, if you had to do it all over, is there anything on your most recent RFP that you would have done differently?

Todd Leiser 29:37
probably gotten started earlier on the data side data, data data, right, you can never have your data at the level you need it in order to really leverage these platforms to their fullest. So got to have the data foundation and under control before you really head into this process.

Chris Marriott 29:52
Awesome. And let's just see it with probably not enough time to answer this last one. I don't want to rush But But Tata Martina I'm sure would be happy to answer any questions anyone has I mean Todd or Martina if somebody had a question specific about RFPs How would they contact you?

Martina Lipp 30:12
Um I think best strategy on LinkedIn will probably be a good way to reach me and or shoot me an email but probably linked this by the better option I would say so yeah, let's remember an email address right now.

Todd Leiser 30:23
Yeah, LinkedIn Tod le AI SCR or Tod l at Spartan comm All right, well, ah, over.

Chris Marriott 30:33
Up, it looks like we might still be live, folks, if we're still live. I want to thank Todd, I want to thank Martina great learnings today. Thank you for joining us. And again, feel free to reach out to any of us with questions that you have that are directly for you. Thanks, everybody.

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