The Vendor Relationship

Is so key to a business today. In the past many business owners have treated their vendors poorly. Beating them down for the lowest prices, constantly comparing them to their competition and I have even heard them verbally abuse them.

So what value is there to having good vendor relations?

You become the "Preferred reseller" in the area. In other words when there is an opportunity in your territory, the vendor is going to give it to you because they want to help you like you want to help them.

Training, you are first on the list.

Marketing, they come to you with the marketing opportunities

There are so many more. It becomes a partnership in business versus an adversarial tug. You want a leg up on your competition? Have better relationship with your vendors.

Baseball

Last night Caden did not want to go to his Baseball game. It was HOT. OK sure it was 102 but a committment is a committment. He had a great game. 2 hits and made an out!

I find this like marketing events and sales calls. Sometimes I do not want to do the events (Planning, setup, materials and all that stuff) or sales calls (Rejection, travel or objections) However doing the activity usually equals real rewards. You hone your skills, make some sales and capture some leads.

Every once in a while you even make a home run!

Another really solid Marketing Event

So we had another solid marketing event today. Packed full of information for internal sales & Technical staff, customers and more.

Usually I get a bit stressed about people showing up to these events. Not today. We did the first part of the day with PEER groups. We had 20 some members that showed up and had great discussions around issues that face them every day. From where the cloud is going, end users and more. Then we had a good presentation from Daniel with MX logic and then a Disaster recovery discussion with Veda (SP) from Quorum Labs.

Next we had a public presentation to another 20 or so people on the same two subjects. We did not do cold calls to customers or do multiple mailers. We simply sent an email invite and people wanted to come. So we had customers that were genuinely interested in these specific solutions. Simple day.

While we had the resources in the area, they did sales and technical training in our office before their presentation keeping both of these resources busy all day. Great utilization.

Tammy and team did a great job keeping this on task last week while I spent some time on the beach.

A little bird told me.

So many things can be learned by nature. This bird and chicks are in our back yard. We have watched the building of the nest. We know of one that was in the front yard that fell out of the tree due to wind. It is amazing how heavy and well constructed they are. Then we noticed one of the eggs that fell out of the tree that this picture of the chicks is from. And last the momma feeding the chicks and watching me and the kids walk near the tree. Trust me you do not want to get too close to the nest.

I will let you draw your own lessons from the bird that keeps building a nest, over coming weather and loss then working all day to keep the chicks fed.

Made it home and off to the office Monday!

All our flights were on time and we made it home by early evening. Just enough time for Jenifer to get things back in order around the house.

This week will be a busy week. 2 customer events with multiple vendors coming to town and many things to get organized. I look forward to catching up in person with some of the vendor Representatives and people they bring. Some are coming from California and may be interesting since they were making sure that we had public transportation to our events (IE Subway and such) We will be introducing them to the Midwest!

What a great vacation and now back to work!