What would it be like to have a great Partner, not just a vendor?
Do any of these struggles sound familiar?
- You have to explain the same thing to your partner multiple times.
- Your vendor is not interested in your business and only performs the work you ask for.
- Your vendor is only focused on completing the task and not interested in seeing it through to success.
- You hesitate to call a vendor for support because you know it will cost you to make the call, regardless of whether the issue was resolved or not.
- You have completed an initiative and find out that it did not solve your problem.
- Your vendor stopped a project until they get approval for more funds regardless of impact to your business.
During my career, I have been on both the Customer side of receiving services and the Partner side of delivering services. I have worked with Partners that are focused on their profits and Partners focused on the customer business health.
I prefer the partners that focus on me as a customer or my business health. The partners interested in my business focused on helping me achieve my business goals. They took the time to understand my goals to represent what success looks like for me. They focused on those goals and made decisions throughout the process to deliver those goals. I was willing to invest in this type of partner to make sure we accomplished our goals because they were in it for me as a Customer. When this happened, we were always successful.
Now as a service provider, I challenged myself to deliver services to every customer in a way I want to be treated as a Customer. As a result, we have created an organization that is committed to achieving our client objectives. We do this by:
- Training our entire organization to take the time to clearly understand our customer’s objectives.
- Investing our time to understand the Customers business and real needs before we start any project so that we understand the core goal and are committed to delivering that goal.
- Challenging our Customers to look at all aspects of the problem regardless of where this leads, including people, process or systems.
- Measuring success based on delivery of goals and building a statement of work (SOW) around those goals to ensure we are always successful.
- Creating an open and collaborative partnership by performing fixed bid projects to enable each Partner to interact as necessary and be successful without hidden barriers.
- Helping customers make decisions based on their needs, not ours. We won’t offer any service or product that is not needed. By doing this, we are more efficient in everything we do.
When we achieve all of these goals, we find that in every case:
- Our Customers are able to meet their goals.
- Our Customers begin to see value in their NetSuite investment.
- Our Customers gain long term Partners.
When you realize that you have a great Partner, you will believe that your strategies and vision can come true.
If you want to see this process in action, sign up for our complimentary business process assessment and the Concentrus team will work with you to identify the root causes if your business problems, define what success looks like to you, and recommend a solution to help get there.
