Sanramon Windemere Homes for Sale: Moving from Vendor to Trusted Partner

Strategies for Moving from Vendor to Trusted Partner
by: Andrew Sobel

I recently interviewed a CEO about his most trusted relationships with external service providers and suppliers. About one particular organization, he said,

“The consistent service and quality they offer are key factors, but it’s more than that. They’ve built many strong relationships with our people, and they consistently add value. We’re not their biggest customer, but they still make us feel special. I really view them as a long term partner in growing our business.”

What this CEO described is what I call a trusted client partnership. The relationships endure for years. They invariably contribute a disproportionately large share of your revenues and profits. They can make or break your career.

Who wouldn’t want to have more of them?

In researching my most recent book, All for One, I studied 50 major, trusted partnerships built with clients and customers by a variety of different companies. What I found is that there are a ten strategies you must consistently implement in order to reach this level. Here are four of them, which I express as a series of shifts:

Strategy 1: From Agenda Reacting to Agenda Setting. Order takers are reactive and they spend their lives submitting bids in competition with others. Agenda Setters actually create sole-source demand for their products and services. They have frequent conversations with their clients about what’s happening in the industry, what competitors are doing, new best practices, and how the client needs to evolve to meet these challenges. An Agenda Setter proactively engages clients in value-added conversations about their most essential priorities and goals, and as a result earns a seat at the table.

Strategy 2: From selling to executive engagement. Executive engagement is about engaging a senior decision maker in a thoughtful dialogue about his or her critical issues, and building trust in your capacity to address them. Trusted partnerships must be anchored at a senior level, and connecting with the c-suite means changing the way you sell. It means you stop asking jaded questions like “What keeps you up at night?” and instead ask how your client is reacting to some of the critical issues facing her company; it means showing (“let me give you an example of how we achieved a 20% reduction in costs for another client of ours…”) rather than telling (“we have 20 offices in 10 countries”).

Strategy 3: From individual to institutional relationships. Trusted partnerships are built on multiple trusted advisor relationships—what I call many-to-many relationships—which means you become a door-opener not a gate-keeper. If you are in sales, your job doesn’t stop there—you have to help create a latticework of strong relationships throughout every function such as sales, relationship management, service, delivery, research and development, and also between your senior management and your client’s.

Strategy 4: From core value to multiple layers of value. You must consistently deliver on your core value—on what the client contracts for. But this just earns you the right to be a “steady supplier.” To earn trusted partner status, you must add value three additional areas:

Personal value. Your job isn’t just to supply a good product—it’s to make your client look good and be more successful!
Tangible value. The client must perceive the tangible benefits of what you offer, be it faster time to market, fewer returns, increased revenue, and so on.
Intangible value. This becomes apparent to the client in the later stages of a trusted partnership. This could include skills transfer (you train your client’s staff), faster decision making (you enhance their information flows), better relationships (their customer reps are complaining less and working better with service); etc.

You must think of each client as a market of one, and therefore the value-added must become tailored and unique rather than generic.

To evolve from a vendor to a trusted partner, you have to rethink how you sell and how you build relationships. The payoff, however, is huge.

To learn more about how to create long-term partnerships with your clients and customers, click here and pick up a copy of Andrew Sobel’s new book, All for One: 10 Strategies for Building Trusted Client Partnerships. Andrew is a leading authority on business relationships, and you can find extensive, free resources for building clients for life on Andrew’s web site at www.andrewsobel.com.