How To Build Quality Relationships With Vendors And Lower Costs

Getting your products and services from concept to cash you need vendors and fulfillment. Anyone from web programmers, fulfillment houses, graphic designers. Whatever type of vendors you may need to use in your business this article will outline a few tips about how you can lower your fulfillment costs while building quality relationships.

Number one, what you could do is send them referrals and recommendations. I constantly, as much as possible, try to send the people that I work with more and more business. The reason is because I want them to see the value of the relationship with me goes much further than the business I personally do with them. That way the relationship is not only benefiting them with the business that I give them, but the business that I also bring through the people that I associate with. They’ll quickly see me in a favorable light. The key here is to try and provide them a benefit as quickly as possible - a great way is to send as many referrals as you can.

I’ve also done joint venture projects with my vendors. Here’s a quick scenario. One of the people that I was working with was a graphic designer. We decided to do a joint venture project together, where she would do the graphic design at no cost, I would provide the product and then put for the marketing effort, and together we would split the profits.

Boom! Just like that I had almost completely eliminated my cost up front and now don’t have to worry about coming up with that money. Starting out, this was really helpful as I didn’t have the money to put up front to hire a graphic designer. So this strategy is really great for that reason and many others.

Some people tell me, “Yeah, but Stu, you’re giving away 50% of the profits. That’s a big chunk of money.” Well, time out for a second. I’m of the viewpoint that it’s better to get your projects completed and making some money versus keeping all of nothing and not getting anything completed.

Instead of just letting those ideas sit on shelf, not making any money, I made an effort to approach and build a relationship with that specific vendor and was able to get those projects completed and off the shelf.

When you are on a tight marketing budget, you’ve got to get creative. And that is one creative idea that I’ve used. I’ve also used that with web developers.

The other thing that you can do to save a lot of money when you’re working with vendors is do as much of the work as possible, ahead of time. You’re saving the vendor time. You’re saving them effort. You can ask them, perhaps, questions on how you could save money, how you could cut down their effort, cut down your overall project costs. These vendors will work with you. They’ll help you. They know you have budgets to work within, and so they’re always interested in working with you and trying to help you.

My last tip for now is instead of creating a completely new project design everytime, create a template to use. This way you can use it over and over again without having to pay your vendors again to do the same work. I’ll tell you more about it in detail.

We will use developing e-Books for example. Instead of getting a graphic designer to design a specific layout for each of your e-Books you generate, it would be a lot easier and cheaper for you to get them to design a template. That way you can use that template for every e-Book you generate after that point instead of paying for it again.

This is a different way about going things - the thing is you will save tons of money - thousands - in the long-run. As for the graphic designer its about the same amount of effort for them to put forth. This is just another idea about how you can again build your relationships with your vendors, but also save a lot of money.

In this article, I’ve outlined a few really quick and easy strategies that can help you build stronger relationships with your vendors and fulfillment companies while saving your money. Many more strategies will come to you once you really start thinking about it.

Ideas will come to you when you explore the possibilities of creativity!