April 13, 2006
V Is for Vendor
Posted by Kevin | Print This Article
I can be a demanding customer and an even more difficult client to land in the first place, especially since I never like being contacted by salespeople and am sometimes not very polite about it. Somewhere I know vendors in the association community get together and complain about people like me. From printing to production, programming to planning, I have fairly high standards, and I’ve been spoiled by a few vendors who exceed them regularly.
I view vendors in just about any arena as partners — I expect them to have the same commitment to whatever we’re working on that I do. They have a stake in the successful outcome and should act like it. When I get treated as just another client, with just another deliverable, nickel-and-dimed to death, I tend to get irritated.
The problem is that we’re never a vendor’s only client, and very rarely the biggest. We fall into that middle ground of business, with a lot of very specialized needs, but a very generic budget. For most projects we don’t have the bucks to make demands and expect the most qualified vendors to line up panting to cater to our every customized whim.
And while all businesses, including suppliers to associations, talk about the importance of customer service, and how “every client is our most important client,” in the real world of deadlines and budgets and limited staff resources and 24 hours in a day, every business has to make choices about how to spend those hours. Suppliers may become adept at making clients “feel” like a priority with good interpersonal skills, but the reality is that there are “levels” of output.
(And association suppliers, I know a lot of you read this blog, but please don’t send me an email filled with platitudes talking about how your company is “different,” because it really isn’t, unless you never have more than one client at a time, or you don’t know how to run a business. I know you have to keep up the marketing pretense, but the fact is that all customers are not alike and should not get treated as if they are, whether you’re a for-profit business or an association.)
Luckily for those of us without mega-budgets, there are other ways companies differentiate between clients and decide how much time to spend on them. Though we are all trained to view those budgets as the end-all be-all, and assume that we play second fiddle to those with a lot more to spend, it doesn’t always come down to dollars-and-cents. It can also come down to this:
People are proud of what they do. Designers love to design and think they are good at it. Production companies love to produce events and think they are good at it. Programmers love to program and think they are good at it. Consultants love to — well, whatever it is consultants do, and think they are good at it.*
People follow the path of least resistance. Even when they’re experts and perfectionists. How many times can you design the same kind of survey for the same kind of organization? Hell, you really only need to design it once and then tweak, right? An association needs signage for an event. Well, you know what associations mean when they say signage. An association needs a new membership brochure. Well, you know what association membership brochures look like. An association needs a new members-only area for its website. Well, you know what assocation websites are like. An association needs an insurance affinity program. Well, you know what insurance affinity programs are like.
People don’t like to be bored. And no matter how much you like whatever it is you do, the path of least resistance is boring. It’s easy. It can sometimes be a lot more profitable. But it’s boring.
People like to be challenged. Want to produce an exciting publication? An event that really sizzles? A survey that really works? A project of any kind that produces results and pushes the boundaries for your organization? But you’re not made of money? Then it’s not enough for you to be excited about it. You have to get your outside vendor excited about it. Not excited in the “woo-hoo I landed another client” kind of way. Excited in the “wow, I’ve never done this, how can I make this work” kind of way.
This means doing something more than producing a standard RFP, picking a vendor, and paying the bills. It also doesn’t mean micromanaging every last detail of every single project for every single vendor. No, it means becoming a fan of the possibilities of what it is you want to achieve. It means moving beyond describing a deliverable. It means asking questions like, “What if we did this? What if we did that? This part — how can we make it different?” (And not deciding on the answers before you ask the question.)
Get a vendor excited about doing something new in his or her chosen field and you’ll find you get a lot more of their time and better, more interesting results. In fact, working within a limited budget can be a fun challenge in and of itself if you’re engaging the supplier in something that is outside the ordinary.
Associations are a strange industry because, while we all do similar things, as a general rule few of us compete with each other. So we look at other associations and think “well, if XYZ Inc. did such a good job with Project A for the Widget Association, then he can also make Project A work for my association.” In fact, we should be looking carefully at how XYZ Inc. can do a different, bigger, better project for our associations — something beyond the norm. Something neither the Widget Association nor XYZ Inc. thought of.
Not only does this get better results from vendors. It produces better results for associations.
Kevin, I think you hit on something that those of us on the inside talk a lot about: how can we better partner with our vendors. It usually comes further down the list from the question of how we can better partner with our members, but it’s a question we do consider.
And I think you start to address this little curiosity: no matter how much we talk about ‘partnering’ do we really give back to the vendor as much as we take? We think that since we give them money, we should get our share of service (kinda like our members feel from us). We WANT. What exactly do we give back in the relationship? Loyalty? Hell, most of our organizations try to beat the lowest price possible out of our vendors and when they don’t meet it, we walk away to someone who will.
This isn’t aimed at you, Mr. Tough-Customer
Rather, it’s the ideas that you raised and how we sometimes can forget that person on the other side of the relationship. Partnership is a two-way street, but often all the cars only go in one direction.
You hit the nail on the head, Chris. There’s much more to be written on the vendor/association partnership. There are mistakes and misconceptions on both sides. Some association executives don’t think beyond rigid budget lines to see value (and most importantly profit) on the back end. And an awful lot of suppliers have become prominent in the association community because they win RFPs … not because they do the best work.
And an awful lot of suppliers have become prominent in the association community because they win RFPs … not because they do the best work.
Ain’t that the truth.
Hi Guys
Just checked this out after seeing the emails on it on the ASAE listserver. You made me think of some programs we attempted to do at ASAE Annual Meeting 5-6 years ago on the vendor-association partnership (years before I made my transition over to what I sometimes still refer to as “the dark side”).
Amazing how face to face presentations lead speakers to pull our punches becuase you made more sense and convey a more realistic perspective than I heard in any of those programs or have seen in years of ASAE & DMA listserver lurking/participation. Some of this should be “required reading” for most staff who only have to select a few vendor projects a year and who issue pro forma RFPs for said projects.
A lot of the managing expectations should occur during the RFP development process but i get the distinct impression that this is either an afterthought or a moderately distasteful chore for staff to deal with. And by the time you’re responding as a vendor (by the way, am not sure if I’ve EVER related to the “partner” term … your incentives as an association or charity are always different from mine, and when I hired many vendors as an association or charity I expected them to act a certain, distinct way based on the fact that I hope they’re excited at least a little more by the work than what’s in my wallet, but also accountable, responsive and flexible. Of course they rarely became my friends as a result since I like pricing concessions or better work more than I like dinners at places where I have to dress up).
Anyway, no idea how broad the readership is here since my own comments are somewhat impolitic but, hell, I was born in Idaho and raised by wolves, and we put a certain premium on cutting through the b.s.–my clients do seem to appreciate it, even if it takes a lot of rambling non-b.s. words to get there…
-Kevin #2
Hey Kevin, I wondered if you would ever find your way to my little space here, particularly since you were one of the association people I mentioned in an earlier post as “people who should blog.”
Thanks for the comment — I think we may just have different personal definitions of the word partner, the relationship you describe is pretty much what I think a partnership is. Partners are partners, not friends (and I’m with you in preferring to avoid dinners with vendors).
And I think you’re right — none of us like to develop RFPs. There really should be a better way.
Thanks for this post and the comments. I have been casting around for some guidance on how to approach associations with a workshop proposal. We have what we believe to be a good workshop, but is it education? professional development? a conference track?
There seems to be an enormous variety of ways that associations develop working relationships with presenters. Each seems to have its own rules, and why shouldn’t they? But it is a little daunting.
If anyone has any good general advice on how you would like to be approached with a workshop proposal, I would love to hear it.