How To Zero Down On The Right Vendor For Your Business
Posted by Abdul Vasi on 26 Jan 2010 at 6:30 pm | Tagged as:
Every business has needs and it is imperative that you,as a business owner, would go out on a limb to find out the right vendors for your business needs at all times of your business operations. We have an ever-growing populace of all kinds of vendors now you could take professional help from. The talent pool is now so large that it is rather tricky to find the right vendor for your needs. So how will you zero down on the right vendor? Try these tips:
Learn from the Initial approach: Assuming you did your search and you did narrow down on a few potential recruits among the vendors for your business, place a call, email them or meet them in person. First impressions will matter for you here. Look at the way they receive you in person, pick your call and talk to you and many other subtle things that can actually form indelible impressions on your mind. Further, you can always call them or email them to check on their response times.
Do a rain check: There can never be anything more foolish that picking up a vendor too fast and trusting them with too much business or trust. Also, if you tend to do a lot of business and bank on a single vendor, anything can go wrong. Commitment isn’t common at all and most of your vendors are in business because they had nothing else to do; they do it because it is family business and it has been handed down from generations, etc. It is best to do a rain check on each vendor — start small and take it from there.
A vendor who doesn’t communicate isn’t worth it: Throw some causal emails down their way and see your vendors respond to that. How long did it take them to return your email? How professional are your vendors when they are talking to you? Don’t forget that you are the customer for your vendors and how they interact with you, respect you and treat you is going to effect your behavior towards them a lot. Since most of the communication happens on emails, phones and the like, it is extremely important to be more responsive.
Experience isn’t the criteria all the time: In most cases, experience will matter and an experienced vendor might just the best solution to have your problems solved. However, it might not always be the case. Amongst this vast talent pool, you’ll still find some great vendors who have no experience at all. Provided these new vendors have passion and like what they do, it can be a great idea to recruit them. They might do a good job since they want to prove themselves and they might also be very economical.
Before choosing your vendor, you can even have some background checks done on your vendors.You could ask your vendors themselves, ask for testimonials from other customers of the same vendor in question, when you do your research and due diligence, it’s highly unlikely that you can go wrong.
