Month: May 2025

How do you communicate with your vendors?

A few years ago I had a new account manager from a vendor call me. Initially he called because he didn’t have my email address. SMH. How do you not have my email address in your system? I didn’t want to give him the time of day. Especially after that. At one point I told him “If you guys didn’t have the best product on the market for this, I would have kicked you to the curb a long time ago.”

What happened next? I asked him to do a few things, and he did them. Then he called back a few weeks later for a check-in. I didn’t want to give him the time of day again. Still he got through, we talked, he responded well and actioned some things, and a month later he reengaged. He grew on me. This AM ended up getting a promotion that was well deserved. I was sad that we were losing him as our primary contact for this vendor. By the time he left it the relationship was better though and that was due to his efforts way more than mine.

He was actually a solid guy who really wanted to help customers. When we first interacted I wasn’t upset at him, I was just unengaged with the vendor, but I directed that at him. I didn’t treat a people like a people. Not good.

I’m trying something new now. The golden rule. If I wouldn’t talk to a personal relationship this way, why would I talk to a team member in this way? If I wouldn’t talk to a team member in this way, why would I talk to a vendor in this way? My experience would tell me that most people are really just trying to do good work and we don’t have to make their jobs harder to get what we need.

How do you feel when you’re clients are more engaged with you? Even in the tough conversations, if a client is engaged it makes a big deal on how easy it is to dig in on the response to the client’s request. Strong relationships make for easier work and value creation. At the end of the day, even for organizations external to us, are just made of people. Engagement with those people will get you further than standing off and being ambiguous to your posture about them. You are trading money for work, don’t reduce it to that though. It’s about value creation not, money transaction.

Words are important, so I started this post referring to external orgs as vendors, but I generally have shifted to referring to them as partners. It’s helped me adjust my thinking of vendors as partners. They’re a part of our team. I also look at them that way. Where do you visualize them on the org chart? That partner is the most expensive employee you have, you should have a monthly checkin at least and probably a quarterly “employee review”.

Quick pointers on how to live this out:
-Weight your perspective to co-creating value.
-Partner meeting cadence
-Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated.”
-Add a layer to your org chart with partner orgs to see how it works
-Kind and nice are different. Mostly be nice, always be kind.