Choosing the Right Vendors Can Be Make or Break for Your Business

Sometimes in business, your success can be dictated by the people you choose to work with. In many industries, companies are truly defined by the partners they have chosen to help them achieve success. When you make the wrong choice of vendor, you might be looking at downtime, backups, unhappy customers or even worse outcomes. Want to become a pro at choosing the best vendors to work with? Here what you should be looking for.

Common Goals

This is perhaps the most important factor in choosing a vendor, whether you are hiring IT specialists, materials providers, auditors or project managers. The employees at the partner business must have your company’s best interest at heart and must do everything it can to help you succeed. That can mean looking forward to new challenge or opportunities you may not have had on your radar or predicting pitfalls before they happen. If you interview a vendor and feel as though your company would just be another number to them, it’s best to look for a different solution.

Good Communication

Even if you have a knowledgeable and helpful partner under contract, it does you no good if you can’t reach them in a reasonable amount of time. What happens if the IT specialists you hired won’t answer the phone when you’re facing a potential security breach or your e-commerce website is down? In addition, they should have technicians who can be dispatched immediately to help; waiting two days for tech support hinders success and profit.

Industry Knowledge

Particularly with IT support vendors, there is an ever-evolving skill set that must be kept up to date. Vendors who don’t make it a practice to stay current on the latest hardware, software and digital storage options – to name just a few – are not people you want to be dealing with. Even outside the IT world, choosing experienced, knowledgeable and intellectually curious partners will usually turn out better for your business growth in the future.

What to Look For

When considering different vendors to work with, there are a few tactics that can lead to better decisions. Make sure to use this checklist:

• Make sure they are experts in the specific area you need them for. Don’t hire a web designer, for example, whose portfolio is filled with sites for photographers if you are a human resources company. Look for someone who specializes in personnel websites.

• Make sure they are organized. If the vendor brings the right materials to the meeting and is prepared with a list of potential topics, the partner likely will continue to be organized in the future. If the company just brings generic materials and general contract prices, that’s just not enough specificity to go on.

• Make sure they understand spending so that you are confident they will stay within the budget you set for their services. Even better, choose a vendor that is always on the lookout for ways it can save you money.

Clearly, choosing good vendors to partner with is vital to business success. BBC Technology Solutions would like to talk about becoming one of your partners. Contact us today!