The question “Are vendors friend or foe?” was asked recently at a conference for higher education purchasing directors. The question quickly took root with this large group of senior managers and an open dialogue ensued. To better understand the many answers, both public and private, to this question we would need to look back to the 1980s corporate America, and the sales mantra embraced by many companies.
     
As hard as corporate America is in the new millennium, the 1980s was the pinnacle of, “The Me” era, and a very important sales bible for corporate raiders was The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. This ancient text mirrored and celebrated the corporate sales belief at the time that the client is the enemy and to close the sale is to win the battle.
     
Higher education during the 1980s was, for the most part, impervious to what was happening outside the walls of academia in the corporate world. With the economic challenges of the new millennium, colleges and universities now have to open the doors to many more companies that supply higher education with solutions, and, of course, with even more management challenges.
     
Since the 1980s a sales and marketing transition has taken place in the business world. Most companies have moved away from the dictum Gordon Gekko spouted in the 1987 movie Wall Street: “Greed is good,” and towards the other side of the spectrum that views the client not as an enemy to be defeated but as a partner to be embraced.
     
The word “partner” permeates most of the sales and marketing material entering the $400 billion higher education arena, so much so that purchasing directors are having a much harder time discerning which vendor is true to that word and which vendor is just talking the talk.
     
Many stories about vendors were voiced from the attendees at the purchasing conference. One was from a purchasing director who considers all vendors a foe. He supported his perception of vendors with a story of an overly aggressive sales person who didn’t know how to stop pursuing a contract even thought his company was number one on the list. His overly “pesky” nature lost his company the contract to a less desirable and effective company because he didn’t know that few in higher education will tolerated overly aggressive sales tactics.
     
A group of three purchasing directors at one table, however, chimed in at once with a resounding, “Friend!” to the question. They supported their perception of vendors as friends illustrating the process each one goes through during an RFP and beyond.
     
The process of ferreting out a vendor friend starts first with the collaborative nature of higher education. In the business world direct competitors rarely if ever will sit down and share detailed business model and internal business infrastructure information. However, in higher education the common procedure of sharing this information with colleagues and competitor institutions is second nature—including which vendor is poison and which vendor is going to work with a college or university as a friend for the long haul.
     
One purchasing director stated, “Our ability to work together is one thing that companies never seem to really understand. The companies also don’t understand that if they cause one of us pain, we all will know about it, because we talk with each other all the time—and that vendor will be history.”
     
These three purchasing directors from prestigious colleges feel that vendors are friends, because through collaborating with their competitor institutions they are only willing to allow true vendor friends into the fold.

 

Bridging the Gap
Reevaluating Partnerships in Higher Education

Partnership, cooperation, and collaboration are only part of the new lexicon of buzzwords vendors are using to attempt to scale what seems to be the impenetrable fortress that is higher education. Most savvy marketing gurus soon find that cooperation is a centralized mantra running through academia, but what they might be missing is the depth of commitment most academics have to cooperating.

A common complaint from higher education is that a vendor might first talk partnership in order to get through the door, but be hard to find for further service after the deal is done. The level of dedication to service that a college or university might expect from a vendor may be more than the company sees as fiscally possible, or fiscally profitable.

Many institutions might see a vendor as an opportunity to fulfill an important ongoing service need that they are not financially able to make possible internally. This is especially true for the 80% of colleges in the United States that have 5,000 or fewer students, and have fewer than the average 1:12 ratio of students to faculty.

A smaller college might have a staff member executing purchasing duties one day, and then be working on emergency preparedness the next, so when a vendor walks in the door talking partnership the college senior manager might misperceive what level of commitment to service the vendor is going to provide. This misperception of what a partnership looks like is one of the large gaps that divide the business world and higher education.

A company that truly wants longevity in higher education might need to take a broader view of the participants who make up academia, and how they are different from the corporate world, and how they are the same. A vendor might also need to evaluate what longevity means to a college or university that is well over a hundred years old.

A clear example of how committed an academic is to higher education is the tenure track. A parallel track in the corporate world most likely will take the participant through the sales process, and hopefully to a higher paying senior management position. In most cases the depth of commitment an academic must embrace to achieve a Ph.D. far exceeds the amount of commitment to a higher paying corporate job.

Rosanne Runte, president of Old Dominion University in Virginia elegantly summed up what might motivate an academic to embrace a ten year commitment that may not even secure a decent paying job. When asked what she thought was her number one obligation as a president of a university, she quickly replied, “To make dreams come true.” This simple statement that communicates a higher ideal is actually a powerful motivation for most who enter the academic world. The next time you are in a college president’s office talking partnership, you might take a moment to consider the level of commitment that might be asked of your company to not only help the institution to be financially successful, but to help the college or university reach those most important goals.

 

Security Directors
A Demographic Breakdown of Who Might Need to Be
on Your Emergency Preparedness Radar

Almost any company that supplies higher education with emergency products and/or services has the security director as a key target on their marketing radar. Since the security director is generally responsible for the management of campus police, security programs, training, and traffic and parking regulations it would only seem logical that he or she would also be the key decision maker, or at least influencer, when purchasing emergency products and or services. However, this assumption might only be partially correct regarding a college or university developing an emergency preparedness plan.
     
Academia has gone through a major shift over the last couple of years managing emergencies on campus. Most in the security management industry consider higher education to be only now waking up to the bigger picture of emergency preparedness.
     
Before the broader challenge of emergency preparedness became so apparent in the last few years, there was a fine line between enforcement of campus security directives and maintaining in loco parentis. The senior management at colleges and universities take the responsibility of in loco parentis very seriously, and to present anything less than the total security of their children to parents can be devastating to the reputation of an institution. In most cases it is the security director who stands at the front line of enforcement and student security.
     
According to two national associations, there is somewhere in the range of 1,100 to 1,700 security directors in academia. Since there are around 4,500 colleges and universities in the United States, who is doing the security director’s job in the other 2,800 colleges, and what part do the security directors play in the larger challenge of creating and implementing a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan?
     
Most state colleges and/or universities have a police and fire force employed, managed, and trained by the institution or the state, depending on how large the institution is. Then there are the rest of the private colleges and universities in the United States. Of course most highly endowed private schools like Yale, Harvard, and Wellesley have a robust police department managing the institutions’ security directives, but what about the other eighty percent of colleges that can barely keep enough faculty on their roster, much less a security force?
     
Many of these small colleges rely on a combination of security employees, local police and fire departments, and outsourcing to a private security company. A senior director at the Department of Justice specializing in campus security observed that the farther away a security force is from the core senior management at a campus, the less input and control they may have in the budgeting of security products and/or services.
     
To better evaluate the input a security director might have on an emergency preparedness plan, we would need to dissect the plan. An emergency preparedness plan is nearly as diverse as the many hundreds of companies that support it with products and/or services. The five core functions that we have identified are: administrative, communication, equipment, facilities, and management of the emergency preparedness plan.
     
Administrative consists of data backup, security background checks, property and casualty insurance, risk assessment, etc. Communications consists of the digital response such as email, cell phone, and video. Also, there is a procedural communications aspect to emergency preparedness that is almost as important as digital response, but may not yet be strongly established nationwide. Equipment consists of fire, police, and medial emergency equipment. Facilities consist of proactive architectural design and even the construction of facilities that implement emergency preparedness. Many companies that supply academia with emergency products and/or services offer ongoing management, but there are many companies that have a high level of management and consulting that offer total integration in the day-to-day operation of the college or university.
     
Clearly security directors have a lot to say about the standard equipment being purchased, but what about the other very important components of the emergency preparedness plan? One must consider that the plan can also be divided into preparing for a hurricane, avian flu, earthquake, or yet another highly disturbed student.
     
Any high tech equipment involving the campus communications infrastructure includes the chief information officer, information technology director, and security director. Anything that directly influences the students includes the student affairs office. Any architectural design includes the facilities directors.
     
The top officer that oversees this group of key influencers can consist of the president, chief financial office, chief operating officer, the chief administrative officer, etc.
     
The thing to remember when placing any of these individuals on your radar is that each title might not reflect the expertise or overall involvement they may have in developing a comprehensive emergency preparedness plan. Also one person might wear all of these titles on a small to mid-sized campus, and maybe wear even a few more titles.
     
Your emergency preparedness marketing plan should most likely take into account each one of these key individuals as an important ally, researcher, influencer, and decision maker, because just like the emergency preparedness plan, the individuals involved can run across a broad spectrum.