My bipolar relationship with vendors

Imagine yourself hunched on your workstation with a cup of cold coffee, left unsipped since you took them from the pantry an hour ago. You stare blankly at the sticky pad in your hand, tearing them one leaf at a time, flicking them down to the carpet muttering, “He loves me. He loves me not. He loves me. He loves me not.” and you were thinking about your suppliers in your mind.

That was of course an exaggerated dramatization (unless you do have a romantic relationship with your supplier), but your client-supplier relationship is not any less than a love-hate relationship, polarized between two extremes. If you work in Marketing (or maybe Procurement), you would deal with numerous vendor / agency / consultant, so you need to be good at Vendor Management.

Fondle them

If you ask your vendor to do dirty job that you don’t have time (or willingness) to do it, you will get the job done, but you are missing an opportunity. Your vendor is supposed to be better than you at the thing that you asked them to do, so naturally there are a lot of things that you can learn from them. Your vendor probably have better ideas at the latest technology, industry trend, and experience from mistakes that they learned from their dealing with other customers (so that you don’t need to repeat it). The best part: you can get these lessons for free, and if you don’t get those free lessons, you don’t get the full benefits of your money, which makes you a sucker.

If you treat your vendor like a dirt, you will get the job done dirtily. Even though a client-vendor relationship is a professional commercial transaction, you can’t deny that there is still an emotional element involved, and sometime they are bigger than you think. Will someone who dislike you work harder for you than he needs to be? For what, to be liked by you? Your supplier won’t jump into fire to save your live. Who are you kidding, they would stab you if you refuse to pay the $200 invoice if they could get away with it. It is a common knowledge that people will work harder for you if they are fond of you, and you can get that by fondling them first. If you pay the same amount of money, but you get a less-than-optimal quality of delivery, then it means you don’t get the full benefits of your money, which makes you a sucker.

Fire them

If you have a vendor who deserves your love, good for you. But before you find that one, you would come across many lazy, incompetent, unprofessional vendors who make your eyes twitch when you talk to them over the phone. If you have them in your employment, do yourself a favor: pull the trigger. Fire them. Dracarys. Everybody is replaceable.

It is always easier to replace a vendor than your own employee. That is one of the reason why that job is outsourced instead of building your competency, so you should play card since it is in your hand. Everybody is replaceable. If your vendor or supplier is really that critical, then the only logical move is to recruit them into your employment or acquire them for Backward / Upstream Integration. Otherwise, set their ass on fire.

One of the best method to deal with these subpar vendors is to fire them before you even hire them. First impression is real, if a vendor appear to be incompetent, boastful, slow in response, or suck at communication, those are red flags, and you should trust yourself. Take your favorite four-letter f-word and apply it to them. Sooner or later you need to do it, and the sooner the better.

Moral of the story as a vendor yourself

It is also good to remember that what your vendor to you is what you are to your customer. If the Golden Rule in Sales is ‘Treat your customers how you would like to be treated by your vendor', then if you want to be hired (and continue to be so), you have to behave professionally (and continue to do so), unless your competitor can’t replace or undercut you, or make you customer be in love with you.
While you are at it, the opposite of the Sales Golden Rule is useful for you to be better at Vendor Management: ‘treat your suppliers how you want to be treated by your customer.’


-Inspired by Giang Nguyen, who are so good at Vendor Management, I would not be surprised if she has a line of vendors clinging at her feet begging to be allowed to polish her shoes for free.