subject: How's Your Vendor Relationship Program [print this page] Pretty much everyone in business nowadays has heard of CRM-customer relationship management. CRM, in fact, is one thing of an industry, with technology providers giving easy to fancy automated solutions and specialised consultants and alternative specialists flooding the information area with their opinions, recommendations, and case studies.
Managing client relationships is terribly vital to a service business. Services are by nature highly relationship-oriented, and investing within the monitoring and maintenance of good connections along with your clients may be a key success strategy.
However what regarding your VRM program? That's, how well are you managing vendor relationships? I assert that businesses that concentrate to the quality of the connection with their vendors will have a significant competitive advantage over those that don't.
A acquainted mantra in the early twenty first century business surroundings is "consider your core competencies," which means that a business needs to devote as many of its resources as attainable to no matter is directly generating revenues and find other ways in which of planning to adjunct areas. As a results of implementing this strategy, companies of all sizes depend on several types of third party providers. Some providers are outsourcers (e.g., janitorial services or IT management companies), others are freelance contractors (e.g., internet programmers or graphic designers), and still others supply merchandise and materials (e.g., printing companies or pc equipment vendors).
Take an instant and think regarding the third parties with whom you are doing business, then answer me this: On a scale of one (terrible) to five (outstanding), what's the quality of your relationship with every of those parties? If you are returning up with a ton of 2s and 3s, you may need to rethink your approach to VRM.
Vendors are businesses too, and they're trying at their own shopper base the identical approach you're trying at yours. They will assess their relationship with you (in terms of each quality and amount) and act accordingly. For example, if you work in to that tiny percentage of high revenue-producing purchasers (a la the Pareto Principle), you are doubtless to urge extra perks, a lot of favorable terms, or higher pricing than the bulk of their clientele. As way as the quality of client service, they will be so much a lot of aware of you and go out of their means to delight you in order to keep and hopefully increase your pay with them.
Edges like these create a right away difference to your bottom line, but there are also less apparent benefits that include maintaining smart vendor relationships. Even the simplest third party relationship-your copier paper provider as an example-can adversely impact your business if it is not working well. And simply like with workers, high turnover in your vendor pool can curtail or disrupt operations. It takes time to forge a smart relationship between clients and vendors; trust needs to build, and each party should acclimate and adjust to the partnership.
