When was the last time you visited one of your vendors?
Too often, the answer is “I can’t remember…”
As business leaders, we typically are more focused on connecting with and staying in touch with our customers. While that makes sense, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that often our vendors are instrumental to our success and we should look to grow those relationships, too. Our recent visit to one of our key suppliers, Armoloy Southeast, was a great example of how this can work and we’re very appreciative of our partnership with their Team!
Here’s 3 Big Reasons why you should consider visiting your key vendors:
- Supply Chains are strained and especially critical right now. These challenging times make it even more important for us to keep lines of communication open, both up the chain to our customers and down to our suppliers. Without solid support from our suppliers, we can be in big trouble.
- Keeping vendor relationships healthy requires similar actions to our customer relationships and visiting definitely helps. Taking the time to share information freely and exhibit consideration for the challenges they are facing helps us see their perspective and share ours. It’s so rare that vendors are visited for positive reasons and making the effort is typically very appreciated.
- You are likely to learn something that will help improve your process and set your vendor up for greater success. Talking through and seeing how your vendor provides their service typically clarifies aspects of how you send work to them. Often you’ll discover that things your company does are unnecessary (adding cost to your equation for no good reason) and other things you could easily do to make your vendor’s job much easier. These opportunities typically only come through a concerted effort to improve the process for all parties involved.
The pandemic has shown us options for keeping connected but certainly visiting in person is a great opportunity to create closer relationships. In seeing faces, talking through challenges and saying thanks for hard work on your behalf, the relationships can develop into true partnerships.
