How to Maintain Great Supplier Relationships

One of the most important areas of a business is building and maintaining strong relationships. Those relationships span to everybody from your customers, to your colleagues, to your employees, and most of all to your suppliers.

Suppliers play a more central role in the supply chain of your business than you think and the entire success of your enterprise really does depend on the quality of the service and the relationship that you have with your supplier. If you have a poor relationship with your suppliers, then you’re likely to have poor quality of products. You may also find that your products are not delivered on time.

Whether you’re talking to construction supply companies or you’re looking to switch over which suppliers that you are using for your main IT services, you need to be able to maintain great relationships where possible, and here’s how you can do that.

Be clear in your communication protocols.

Effective communication is so much more than just being able to pick up the phone. You have to actively listen and be responsive to feedback. As a business leader, you’re going to need to listen to the concerns of your suppliers. You need to be able to understand their problems and challenges and that requires you to listen and always be proactive in finding solutions. You have to do the same thing the other way round too by providing regular feedback to suppliers, as this can help to foster a stronger relationship with better trust.

Always follow through.

Building trust is vital for any business. It allows for open, honest communication, but it does require consistency and following through on all of your commitments. Make sure that you express appreciation for your suppliers and make sure that you are acknowledging their contributions. Without good suppliers, your business cannot be successful. Recognizing that is important. Yes, they need your business, but you also need them. Where possible, arrange face to face meetings with your suppliers instead of doing remote phone calls.

Pay your suppliers on time.

One of the best ways to maintain a good supplier relationship is to make sure that you pay them. There is no point in thinking that you have great supply relationships on the table when really you’re taking time to pay them, which is in turn delaying your production. You want to establish a long lasting partnership with your suppliers, no matter what they are supplying, and you don’t want to treat them as a one time opportunity. Offering stimulating bonuses or incentives can really help them to feel like they are making a difference to you and vice versa.

Leverage software tools.

You need to be able to keep up with industry trends, and that means adopting as many new technologies as possible. Introduce specialized channel management software solutions for your daily workflow that links with your suppliers so that you can communicate easily.

When it comes down to it, the best way to make sure that you are maintaining your supplier relationships is to concentrate on your communication. 

This is a contributed post.