Join us to hear from two influential leaders as they discuss how the Commonwealth can lead the AI Revolution.
01/21/2025
9:30am - 11:00am
Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce
Hear from James E. Rooney about the state of the economy, and how it all matters to businesses, residents, and policymakers.
01/22/2025
2:00pm - 2:30pm
Virtual
Join on us on Friday, January 31, as we host our highly anticipated 2025 Pinnacle Awards Luncheon.
01/31/2025
11:00am - 1:30pm
Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport
Go deeper than basic DEI training to achieve higher productivity, satisfaction, and revenue growth with our new corporate workshop.
Join our Transformational DEI Certificate! Our comprehensive learning & development offerings are designed to connect and grow strong leaders who lead both inside and out of the office.
Our Women’s Leadership Program enables you to take your leadership to the next level by arming you with the most in-demand leadership toolkit.
Our Boston’s Future Leaders (BFL) program provides emerging leaders with a socially conscious and civically engaged leadership toolkit, as well as the opportunity to apply their knowledge through experiential assignments.
City Awake empowers young professionals in a variety of ways that encourages these rising leaders to stay invested in the region’s future success.
We are developing an ecosystem of corporations and partners with the influence and buying power to transform economic inclusion for minority business enterprises (MBEs).
The Fierce Urgency of Now Festival brings Boston’s diverse young professionals together with business leaders, organizations, and their peers to build connection, advance careers and ignite positive change.
09/14/2024 -
09/17/2024
Suffolk University - Sargent Hall
BIMA (the Boston Interactive Media Association) serves a vibrant community of like-minded professionals from agencies, brands, publishers, and ad-tech companies with business interests in the New England market.
For 30 years, the Chamber’s Women’s Network has connected female professionals of all background and career levels. Today, our Women’s Network is the largest in New England, strengthening the professional networks of women each year.
The Massachusetts Apprentice Network convenes employers, training providers, and talent sources interested in developing and implementing apprenticeship programs in occupations across industries and statewide in fields such as tech, advanced manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, and more.
We support small business through public policy initiatives, events designed to connect small businesses in Greater Boston to their peers and established business leaders, professional development offerings, and free small business advising.
Explore our mission and values to better understand how we are leading the business community forward.
Our member directory is your resource to discover, connect, and engage with Boston’s businesses from every industry and sector.
Shining a light on the exact steps diverse vendors should take to do business with corporate buyers
The goal of a supplier diversity program is for corporate buyers to find and use diverse, historically underrepresented vendors to diversify their supplier pipeline leading to greater competition, lower pricing, and better products and services. On the surface this seems like a simple task – corporate buyer has a need that leads them to find a diverse vendor to use, and voila! A deal gets done. But there are a number of nuances to corporate procurement that lead to challenges for diverse businesses to be able to compete for corporate contracts.
One of the biggest challenges we hear from businesses of color is that corporate procurement is a black box. Each buyer has a different set of requirements for their vendors, different procurement timelines, and it’s hard to know who to reach out to if you have a question. By the time a diverse vendor figures out what they need to submit, the request for proposal (RFP) is closed, and the opportunity is lost. To help break down this barrier, the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Pacesetters Network created the Doing Business webinar series.
The Doing Business webinar series allows buyers in the Pacesetters Network to give presentations on their specific procurement practices, thus shining a light on the exact steps vendors should take to do business with the buyer. In these webinars, corporate buyers share important information including what their most purchased goods and services are, when they are looking to purchase different goods and services, how to get on their bid lists, and who to reach out to should they have any questions. Each presentation ends with live questions and answers from the audience allowing diverse businesses to ask their questions in real time.
These webinars are beneficial to the buyers as well. The Doing Business webinars allow corporate procurement teams to share their particular processes allowing diverse businesses to be better able to respond to their RFPs. It also allows them to share information to a number of diverse businesses in the Chamber’s network at the same time.
The majority of the webinars are recorded and saved on the Chamber’s YouTube channel so anyone who was not able to attend the webinar live can go back and watch the replay. For those who don’t have the time to sit through the entire webinar recording, there are notes on the key points made in the session on the Pacesetters website under each corporate buyer as well as important links that were shared in the presentation.
While we recognize that this is just one piece to the puzzle, the easier we can make the process for both corporate buyers and diverse businesses, the more successful we will be in building resilient supplier chains that are inclusive of all of the businesses across the Commonwealth and beyond.
Find the summaries of the Doing Business Webinars and watch the recordings here.
About the Pacesetters Network
The Pacesetters Network brings together mid and large size corporations to increase their spend with businesses of color (MBEs). Pacesetter buyers work together to share supplier diversity best practices and build MBE pipelines.
Click here to learn more about the Pacesetters Network.
Aug 29, 20243:00pm – 4:00pmVirtual
Sep 14, 2024 – Sep 17, 2024Suffolk University – Sargent Hall
Popular Resources