Women of Influence in Partnership with Decideware

Sabrina Traskos: Procurement and the Patient

Marketing Procurement iQ caught up with Regeneron’s newly appointed Vice President of Commercial Procurement, Sabrina Traskos, on how her award-winning approach to marketing procurement is helping get messages about life-changing medicines to patients more quickly, the role models who inspire her, and how she leads as a woman in marketing procurement.

When I ask what strategic value-add means for her, Sabrina Traskos surprises me with her answer. “It’s about getting the information about our products to the HCPs [Healthcare Professionals] and patients faster.”

She goes on to share a recent example about  a promising drug in the clinical trial phase that is helping children be able to hear for the first time, and her enthusiasm for the patient mission is infectious, “You can bet when that product is ready for commercialisation I will move mountains to get our partners going at warp speed to get messaging out about that.  It will change lives. It was one of the exciting things about coming to Regeneron, these products are truly changing patient outcomes.”

When we speak, Traskos has been in her new role at Regeneron for only a month. But it’s immediately clear that she will apply the same partnership-based philosophy that won her the pharmaceutical marketing industry PM Society Awards 2023’s Positive Pitch Award for her work at AstraZeneca.

It’s an approach that’s rooted in a 360-degree understanding of both the marketer and the agency world. It’s centred on the belief that clear communication and shared expectations are the pre-requisites for successful collaboration. As she underscores several times in our conversation, the onus is on both agencies and clients to nurture their relationships, and marketing procurement’s role is to set the tone from the outset.

Procurement DNA: Agency and Client Experience

Traskos describes herself as a career procurement person, explaining “I really wanted to travel and see the world, and I thought I could parlay a procurement career into that.” She worked in a range of technology procurement roles,  in the private and public sectors including the OECD, and across continents, before moving to the East Coast to spend some time working at Dentsu as in-house procurement.

Whilst listening to many colleagues from account management to finance to legal, she realized that often agency-client relationships are “pretty broken right from the get-go.” Walking a mile in agency shoes added an appreciation of the balancing act between retaining talent, delivering on margin, and ensuring client satisfaction.

Traskos was inspired to bring this agency-side knowledge and her procurement experience together in her next role at AstraZeneca. She set about establishing a new agency-client dynamic based on clear expectations, mutual understanding and honest communication. She’s now bringing the same philosophy to her most recent undertaking at Regeneron.

Know your job!

The onus for establishing a successful dynamic doesn’t just sit agency side. Traskos also lays responsibility firmly at the door of marketing teams. Speaking of marketing managers specifically, she advises “know what your role is, take the actions that you’re responsible for, be accountable”.

Then as Traskos says, set expectations with people about how best to work with your team.  Onboarding an agency is like onboarding a new employee.  They need someone to show the processes and templates they need to use. .

As she acknowledges, the challenge for marketers here is in the number and complexity of their agency relationships. When brands work with too many partners across a campaign, the brand manager is reduced to a project manager, conducting an orchestra of discordant partners for every deliverable.

Agency consolidation is an obvious lever to apply, but without consistent processes, agency onboarding, ways of working and strong relationship management, it’s still a recipe for chaos.

Certifiably strong relationships: Building Trust

Traskos’ approach to tackling that chaos is for procurement to lead a cross-functional team to establish the fundamentals for partnership. While at AstraZeneca she rolled out Farmer & Co’s Agency Certification Program and that experience  will inform her next steps at Regeneron too.

“Once a team has chosen their partner, you should take time to figure out how to work together –  what is the cadence and, if you can get into a rhythm of working where everyone has shared expectations, you can focus on what could drive a competitive advantage. At a minimum, you can certainly reduce re-work and gain some speed to market.

Procurement needs to do more than just half yearly business reviews about pricing. [Instead] it’s important to make sure a partner gets onboarded to the client organisation properly and ensure that the brands are set up for success.

It starts with the brand and agency teams coming to a shared understanding of what the brand’s performance objectives are. Then, it’s aligning on which campaigns to prioritise, auditing current activities and briefs, developing new scopes of work with equal participation from both brands and agency, moving away from hour-based billing and ultimately refining the briefing and approval process so there’s only justifiable needs for re-work.

This process discipline will be increasingly important as AI begins to enter the conversation. There is a need to balance out speed to market with potential risk, but also to make sure there is a correlation between fees and value, rather than hours worked.

Traskos acknowledges that this certification isn’t for every single agency relationship, although it can equally work with any partner, not just large holding companies. However, she adds, “For the specialist, niche agency that has been called in to help on a special project, it’s not worth the effort”.

For building fruitful long-term relationships with core suppliers, Traskos believes it’s a must. “Agency Certification is a brand and agency’s best shot at success. We cannot get to a point where the net result is bigger than the sum of the parts without this alignment in values and ways of working. It’s core – for us to trust the agencies, and for the agencies to trust us.”

She adds this caveat: “If you’re already hitting all your goals, then don’t change a thing. If you have an appetite to improve where you stand as a brand, this can help accelerate that. It’s important to remember that one size doesn’t fit all and success looks different in every organisation.”

Fearless Tenacity: Women of Influence

Tenacity and fearlessness are two values cose to Traskos’s heart, and inherent in the bold, enduring and successful relationships that she envisages in her work. Traskos’ philosophy becomes even more clear when she reveals her inspirations outside of the world of work.

“Agatha Christie was a tremendously successful woman whose publications are only exceeded in popularity by the Bible and Shakespeare.  She volunteered over 3,400 hours as a nurse during WWI.  She volunteered a second time during WW2 and while she was a pharmacist by day (where she honed her knowledge of poisons), she would come home and write these amazing plot lines in the evening to make money for her family.  And she managed to enjoy her life tremendously by all accounts.”

Traskos’s other big influence is no less inspiring. “I also like Beryl Markham a lot. She was also an author, a horse trainer and  was the first person to fly across the Atlantic from Britain to North America, on her own and without stopping.  She had a strength of character and determination and an ability to manage fear. And she also lived her life fully and said what she had to say when she felt compelled.”

Reflecting on what these women exemplify to her, Traskos explains we don’t all have to find 25 hours in every day or perform the extraordinary to make an impact. It is their traits, rather than their specific achievements, that she focuses on. “Both these women balanced daily life and did amazing things by staying the course, overcoming fear and obstacles and not worrying about how people would judge them while they pursued a full life.

How is that not inspiring? You need that if you’re going to try to do things differently than they have been done before and still enjoy life.”

Striking a balance as a woman in leadership

Traskos does also find within these women an uncomfortable truth that is still present today. To lead and/or effect change, you must have a strong attitude and not worry about what is being said behind your back while you move your plan forward. She adds: “Women get called out on that more than men do when they go a non-traditional route.”

“It’s not easy being a woman and each one of us has faced adversity at some point.  While I love Christie and Markham, many days  the woman that makes the biggest impact on me  is the one that Iknow is going through a lot personally or professionally and yet she still gets up,makes breakfast for her kids and sits down in the evening to listen to the latest Lego accomplishments of from their day.

My point is that we all have to keep going and if a single mom of three can get up every morning and get breakfast on the table, you too can get yourself out of bed and do what needs to be done.”

Leadership, Traskos insists, is about listening and making sure you’re hearing reality, not just words. “The leader sets the culture and the tone for the team or organisation.  So, it is very important to help people feel safe and motivated.  During times of fast growth, you need to convey ambition but ensure that people don’t forget about managing risks. During lean times, a leader needs to be realistic but remind people of their ability to achieve great things.”

She cites Dana Maiman, CEO of IPG Health, as a leader demonstrating both the strength and compassion and the partnership values that Traskos herself cultivates. Maiman led FCB and thentook the helm of  newly created IPG Health during the pandemic and had to bring together a number of networks that had a long history of competition.

It took an iron clad will to bring those together as her team and still maintain healthy financial results that go along with happy talent. With Maiman, Traskos notes that she balanced IPG’s forward trajectory with “so much compassion” for her teams. “[She] means business and get things done but she is still kind and takes the time to get to know everyone she interacts with.”

She’s also a consummate professional dedicated to overcoming challenges to serve patients’ needs. “I have seen [Dana] break down every obstacle so that she can put together a team of experts based on the patient at the center of it all … Yeah, she never loses that focus on the patient.”

That’s something that Maiman and Traskos have in common.

About Sabrina Traskos

Sabrina Traskos is Vice President of Commercial Procurement, Regeneron’s

About the author

Helen Thompson is a regular contributor to Marketing Procurement iQ. She spent 18 years in marketing procurement roles in pharma, life sciences and consulting, in the UK, Switzerland and the USA. Helen founded her own independent consulting practice in 2022, and now works on strategic change projects with major brands, agencies and production companies.

The Women of Influence insight series is published in partnership with Decideware

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