Supplier relationship management

Will your suppliers prosper this year?

In my last entry, I asked you to examine your organization. Is your company focused and ready to prosper this year? If not, you still have some work ahead of you on that front. Go back to my last post and use that to help you get focused. Those of you who already have the focus can now turn your attention to your suppliers. How are they going to do this year? How can you know?

The first thing is to understand what their debt is. Continued »

Prosper in tough times

I promise, this won’t be another “2009 is going to be full of doom and gloom” post! You don’t need to be told the obvious; you’re living it right now. What you need to know is what you can do to come through the economic downturn better than ever. My next round of blog posts will focus on what you should be doing to not only survive, but to prosper and grow in 2009.

First, know thyself. Continued »

Stopping directaphobia

There’s no worse feeling: You find out that an opportunity you were working on with a manufacturer was just taken direct. You found the opportunity and yet somehow control was lost and the customer placed the order directly with your supplier. How did this happen — and maybe more importantly — how can you prevent it in the first place?

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CDW awards partners of the year

CDW has named five companies its 2008 Partner of the Year award winners. They are:

• Cisco Systems (networking)
• Ingram Micro (distribution)
• Lefthand Networks (storage)
• Tripp Lite (power protection and distribution)
• Wasp Barcode (data capturing and tracking)

The awards honor businesses that provide “exemplary products, programs and support” to CDW, the company said.

Top 3 emerging company success factors

In my last entry we discussed becoming the emerging technology experts in your field, the guys that can fully vet and recommend the right technology to clients. While you can never guarantee success with the companies that make these products, your clients are going to want some assurance that they’re not making a big mistake in buying an emerging technology, and this is especially important in today’s down economy. There are several factors to look for in a new company when determining whether it’s on the right track.

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Are you leverageable?

I spend much of the week speaking with suppliers about their solutions, and as you can imagine in almost every conversation the subject of the channel comes up. I’m surprised how little manufacturers understand about the channel and how to properly leverage the channel. So the first question is: Are you leverageable? Continued »

Tactics for gaining ground in big-vendor territory

In my last entry I wrote about large suppliers and their in-the-field resources and the problems that creates. After all, a larger supplier probably has more local resources than you do. Typically, they have you outnumbered in both engineers and salespeople.

In the past, many resellers have based their value-add on their ability to offer a complete solution. For example, if you’re working with a storage vendor, part of your value-add might have been to offer the backup products that complete the solution. The challenge is that many of the larger vendors already offer complete solutions. They have systems, disk, tape, software, etc.

Today, to avoid being stymied by this, there are two, not mutually exclusive, tacks that you can take. Continued »

Dealing with large manufacturers

How many salespeople and sales engineers do you want your manufacturer partners to have? Before everyone yells ZERO, let’s think about that for a minute. Different manufacturers have different levels of resources in the field. We’re beginning a series of blog entries on which level makes the most sense for you, and that will vary based on the size and ability of your organization.

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Finding the right products to bet on in a tough economy

In my days as a storage reseller CTO, one of my goals was to find three great new products and add them to our portfolio every year, replacing products that weren’t doing well or where the relationship with the supplier had gone south. To find these needles in the haystack, I had to interview more than 100 prospective suppliers. Then we would do hands-on testing of the most promising 30 or 40 products; the top five of those would get a detailed examination and would be brought to sales and engineering leadership.

During this process, we were always cognizant of the economic environment. Obviously, the current one that you face is changing the buying behaviors of your customers; you should expect this environment to persist for the next three years.

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Vendors: Invest more in channel sales and less in operations, study says

If you’ve ever felt like the last thing you need from a vendor is yet another channel web portal, and what you’d really rather have is a darn good lead, you’re probably not alone.

A new report is attempting to make your point.

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