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VSP Global Reduces Year-Over-Year Spend With Internal Budget Campaign

VSP Global Reduces Year-Over-Year Spend With Internal Budget Campaign

For leading vision insurance provider VSP Global, whose ultimate purpose is to save customers money on vision care, it's important to be extra conscious of company spending. The company launched an internal marketing campaign to educate its employees on proper spending and strategic sourcing for vision care.

The Challenge

In December 2013, VSP Global’s CEO turned to Greg Tennyson, the company’s Chief Procurement Officer, to figure out a way to gain a holistic view of how VSP Global bought goods and services across the business. Not only looking for better discounts in purchases but reducing risk as well.

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However, VSP Global operates in 100 countries and has approximately $500 million in sourcing and procurement spend each year. This can be difficult to supervise in a global company with nearly 6,000 employees worldwide.

“Given that VSP is more than 60 years old, we had to get creative in how we changed well-engrained behaviors,” said Tennyson. “So, we had some fun with it and focused on our core values, identified the issues and behaviors around the buying process and launched a drip campaign to better our business outcomes.”

The Solution

Tennyson and his team created an internal marketing “Spend Like It’s Yours” campaign, which encourages the company’s employees to practice smart spending through strategic sourcing.

The campaign included:

  • Six videos detailing the dos and don’ts of proper purchasing;
  • A company mascot—called Moola—to add character to the initiative; and
  • An acronym—SILIY—formulated by Tennyson and his team, to help employees easily remember the steps to proper purchasing.

Tennyson added that, initially, executive buy-in was not proactive enough for the new buying mindsets to be widely adopted throughout the organization. Along with the campaign, he had to highlight how the benefits could impact the company greatly if the entire organization adopted it.

“We reached out to [the executives] and suggested this with a business case,” Tennyson said. “We could then demonstrate the value of the business with that executive support and grew it from there. Three years into it, and we're starting to reap the benefits of the campaign.”

The Results

In the first year, Tennyson said that the company achieved a 15% reduction in year-over-year spend. In the following two years, VSP Global has also seen growth in contracts.

Tennyson also said that the insights gained from this campaign enabled the team to identify where performance can improve even further and scale to the growing needs of the business.

“We supply all the reports back to the business, which is done in a positive and nurturing way, and aimed to drive better business outcomes,” Tennyson said. “This helps our reps perform better and allows us to better manage our business.”

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