“Our meetings at the Marcus Evans Summit were very productive. As a result, we gave business to a vendor that was not on our radar, and increased business with an existing vendor,” said Jose Molinar, Global Packaging Director, Colgate Palmolive, a speaker and delegate at the Marcus Evans AmericaPack Summit.
I attended as a speaker, and had a few one-on-one meetings with vendors. It was my first Marcus Evans event. I was a bit skeptical at first, not sure what value I would get from my attendance, but the Summit went beyond my expectations.
One of the main opportunities came from our face-to-face meetings. In my global position, I am not always very involved in local or divisional vendor selection. When I started talking with one of the companies, I was surprised to discover they had some added benefit services that we were not exploring. They could be more than one of our commodity vendors. That meeting was very fruitful.
They were, but they were not looking at them from a global perspective. We have three factories across the US. The vendor had approached each of the procurement managers, but not the divisional heads of procurement or packaging. That was the connection that I was able to make. When the pandemic hit us, we had to stop all our plans, but we are now moving forward with a pilot evaluation of this service.
Meeting the vendor at the Summit gave us the opportunity to discuss the service in depth, and to understand the potential value for us. We were not looking for it. It was not on our roadmap but it was an interesting proposition. It is fairly impossible that I would have discovered that service on my own if I had not attended the Summit.
We are a large company. One of the lessons for me was that my team, our local and divisional managers, need to be exposed to this event much more frequently. That became very clear to me. They would have found the Summit even more valuable than I did.
We are using one of their products, which we were not aware of before. I met the company at the Summit, and facilitated the conversations.
I liked it. It was a good way to meet different vendors, to focus our attention for 30-minutes on what they do and how they can help us. This is what made the Marcus Evans Summit different from other events. We had the opportunity to connect with companies that we otherwise would not find on our own.
Some of the smaller companies would not appear in my global radar, but there is still great value in meeting them. In a company like ours, we need to find a good combination of vendors with a global footprint, but also divisional or country-strong local vendors that have the expertise and closeness to the market.
The speakers were very good, high-level decision makers. Most of the topics were very relevant and valuable. The conversations we had with the presenters during the breaks were also meaningful.
Learn more about the upcoming Packaging Summits below:
AmericaPack Summit - Official Website
Pharmaceutical Packaging Summit - Official Website
EuroPack Summit - Official Website
For more information, please contact: Kyriakos Xenophontos, kyriakosx@marcusevanscy.com