Rarely have I found business professionals in the channel that are anything but helpful, kind and generous.  Each person has his or her own personality and characteristics, but most everyone is interested in helping their partners, growing business and would like to see others succeed as well.  (Of course, this is not to say that we all want to see our competitors do well at our expense.)

The reason I mention this is that I recently had an experience with a vendor that was earning a bad reputation with its channel partners for being difficult.  However, this reputation was not because anyone in the vendor was purposely being difficult.  In fact, every person in the vendor organization was, individuallly, very interested in helping the partners succeed.  Every person in the vendor took extra time and invested extra energy to help the partner capitalize on wins and realize success.

So, how does a vendor with so many employees focused on help partners end up with a reputation of being difficult?  In this particular case, it was because the vendor's staff weren't talking to each other, at least not often and about the matters that ultimately they needed to discuss.  It turns out that each vendor employee was allowing the partner to do something to get a sale closed, but without telling others in the vendor organization, each time a sale was close to closure someone in the vendor organization who had not been included in the conversation had a issue with how the sale was done.  Always, the issues were for good reason.  But always the partner felt that it was one more hurdle that had to be cleared.

Consistent, clear and comprehensive communications throughout the vendor organization would have given the vendor the reputation it deserved.  The vedor really did want to be helpful and supportive, but unfortunately, that is just not how the partners saw it.  If you work in a vendor organization, how can your internal communications be improved to better support your partners?  What is the effect of not effectively communicating internally?

William Vanderbilt

+1 630 343-6261

wvanderbilt@innovativelearningchannels.com