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The Nonprofit Toolkit series of CyberEssays.

You will serve your organization best if you plan realistically, evaluate thoughtfully, test carefully and buy cautiously. You can achieve these things most easily by working with a conservative vendor. Here are keystone concepts to selecting and training that vendor. If explanation is needed, you’ll find it below – along with a closing statement about why these principles are essential to your success.

** Select a conservative vendor ** Collaborate ** Teach your vendor **

** Learn from your vendor ** Don’t require complicity **

** Respect business realities **

 

• Select a conservative vendor. Then you won’t be pressed to place an order right away. Or urged to increase the size of your order. Or be manipulated by slippery pricing. A conservative vendor helps you define the results you want to achieve and then helps you select products that will do the trick. This kind of vendor doesn’t need to reduce product quality or cut client service to meet payroll or to carry receivables or to service debt.[1]

• Collaborate. Build. Think long-term. A good vendor seeks creative synergy and solid relationships. A hustler seeks to meet this month’s quota and earn a commission.

• Teach your vendor. Make sure he or she understands how your organization works. Review your event calendar and fundraising schedule with the vendor. Instruct the vendor in the demographics and needs of the constituency you serve. Inform the vendor about the affinity group that supports your work. Explain your administrative and financial realities.

• Learn from the vendor. Ask him or her to teach you how different products are imprinted. Seek to understand product quality and perceived value, and how products generate impressions for your organization. Acquire knowledge that will help you be the effective employee who knows how to buy smart. That knowledge will make you a better client for the right kind of vendor.

• Don’t require complicity. Avoid the vendor who lets you make mistakes just to get the order. When his or her experience dictates, a good vendor will urge you to reduce the size of an order or tell you to select a different product or insist you step down to a less expensive imprint. A good vendor will be able to explain why a product may be inappropriate for your market or for your intended use, or too expensive for its purpose or a reflection of personal taste rather than the taste of your market. Being committed to the relationship instead of the order, a good vendor applauds an appropriate product choice, urges caution about a doubtful one and gladly gives up sales to help clients avoid costly mistakes. Choose a good vendor!

• Respect business realities. Your vendor understands that you are paid to look out for your organization’s welfare. In a collaborative partnership, each party also looks out for the other guy’s welfare. Accept your share of that responsibility. Be respectful of matters like factory production schedules, vendor credit policy, invoice due-dates, the cost of un-reimbursed samples and services, the amount of time your vendor spends on tasks like product research for you, etc. Respect your vendor’s business reality. That will earn reciprocity and more.

BOTTOM LINE – Companies and individuals in the promotional products industry have an exceptionally broad range of business practices. Wise nonprofit marketers know some of those practices are unhealthy for them and their organization. They also understand that the relationship between product price and quality can’t be ignored. In the face of so many variables, and with so much at stake, they seek a collaborative relationship with an exceptional promotional products vendor.

Remember: once a product with your organization’s logo is out in the hands of end-users, it is forever beyond your control. Yet it will affect your brand equity in ways that are helpful or harmful as long as it survives. Or as long as it is remembered. That’s why you want to select a conservative vendor and train him or her well.

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[1] ANECDOTE: VisABILITY always urges clients to buy cautiously. We’re not always successful. One national client ignored our advice for months, buying sweatshirts by the gross every couple weeks. We insisted he was overdoing it and urged him to reconcile his on-hand, on-order and usage numbers to get a better handle on his needs. Finally we insisted – no more reorders until he visited his fulfillment house and took a hand-count to validate the stock reports he was receiving. Somewhat irritated, he agreed and drove to the fulfillment house (about 50 miles away) to count his organization’s inventory. A block from his destination he encountered a couple of guys at a sidewalk kiosk. They were selling his organization's sweatshirts! It turned out they had been stealing inventory from the fulfillment house for months and selling it on the street. We subsequently figured that 350 to 400 sweats had been stolen over a three-month period. (Thereafter, as you may expect, he no longer resented the advice we gave him and was a sincere convert to our code of caution.)

© 2008 by VisABILITY - PO Box 1659 - Lyons, Co 80540