You know you treat your customers well, but do your vendors treat you as well?
Entrepreneurial companies are long on energy and ideas but are often short on infrastructure. They need contractors—for financial services, tech support, marketing expertise, real estate savvy, and the like—that can function as true partners.
Turning Vendors Into Partners provides a few questions to ask any potential vendor.
- How focused will your company be on my company?
- Who will be working for me?
- What happens in an emergency?
- How do I know you’ll be there when I need you?
- How hungry are you?
Make sure you have answers to these questions when your potential customers come calling.
This is a great topic!
With the incline of small businesses and entrepreneur’s, the fact of “partnering” is a reality and neccessity that we need to depend on for survival, and for budgeting…
Although our Attorney recommends that we do not use the term “partner” we are adopting the method of “Affiliation”. I.E. We are teaming up with other small companies; vendors, that compliment what we do. We have become “partners” with a couple of different types of businesses that add to our offerings, as well as giving that affiliate some of OUR solutions to sell to their clients as added offerings.
This affiliation has worked tremendously, and we plan to expand our resources, and experience within each affiliate, and create a “neighborhood” of businesses that are essentially “partners in excellence”.
I will write more about this topic on by blog, instead of taking up all of the comment space.
http://www.iowabusiness101.com
To forward thinking…
J Christian Connett
Director of Business Development
eSolutions Interactive
http://www.esolutionsinteractive.com
christian@esolutionsinteractive.com515.205.9195