"You cannot escape the responsibility of tomorrow by evading it today." – Abraham Lincoln
Last summer I wrote an article titled "Winning the Lottery and Other Bad Behavior" which covered some of the ways distributors act when things don't go exactly as we wanted them to. Specifically I covered the outrageous demands distributors made on suppliers for minor issues. I also mentioned that suppliers are not all saints either and that I would address that in a later article – well here we go!
Suppliers take notice – we distributors don't buy your merchandise, we sell it! You do not get purchase orders from us until we have sold your products to someone else. In this partnership we have specific assignments in selling to a shared customer. So when you produce less than advertised quality, miss event dates, ship to the wrong address, package poorly which causes breakage, use the wrong art, print the wrong color or any of the other mistakes that happen every day – take responsibility! When an end-buyer – our shared customer refuses to pay why do suppliers expect the distributor to be on the hook for the invoice?
Now let me state that most suppliers are quick to acknowledge their shortcomings and will propose ways to fix the situation as quickly as possible. They will work to repair any relationships with sellers and customers and look forward to many years of great business. But there are suppliers that take the other route!
One group of suppliers that tries to avoid responsibility by any means is the undercapitalized ones. You can identify them in some cases when a distributor has great credit but the supplier still requires a deposit or full payment in advance. If the supplier can't operate without your cash, they will not be able to fix problems if they happen.
Then there are the "good enough" suppliers that insist the customer is always being too picky. While good enough or what is generally referred to as “within industry standards” has some degree of interpretation, these suppliers insist that everything they produce meets their standards! They also tend to have “policies” that require the customer or distributor to return a large number of examples (or the full order) at their own expense. If the supplier eventually agrees that the standards were not met, they claim they will credit the costs. In practice this has no consideration for the customer needing their goods and rarely results in a full credit to the distributor. And do you really want a credit meaning you have to deal with the supplier again? They count on never doing business with you again and never having to give up a cent!
Some suppliers have made a science of losing customers and spreading ill will. They employ rude staff and then back the staff up with rude management! For the record, suppliers, when you made a mistake and a distributor is trying to keep the shared customer happy, don’t keep repeating your policies! Nobody cares! Empower your staff to fix things quickly and move on. Have someone teach you about the value of the relationship you have with a distributor and how to preserve it.
Now to be fair, suppliers have to sort through all the complaints distributors make that are unwarranted, picky, invented, or ridiculous. But that should take only a few minutes. Using digital photos, email and phone a supplier should be able to quickly make a determination and start to fix the problem. If that is not how you operate then you can be sure you are losing customers.
Here is an example: We had a little napkin order last fall that was printed very crooked. To meet the event the supplier needed to immediately reprint. But the supplier would not. They had policies that required a new purchase order, the return of the entire job and (get this) they would then inspect all 1,000 napkins and credit for any they felt were not to their standards! Needless to say we placed the order with a different supplier and put the original supplier that averaged more than $1,000 a week from our company, on our do not use list. We also had to deal with condescending rude people with no concern for our shared customer.
Again to be fair to suppliers, if distributors (the many that take advantage) refrained from trying to make suppliers responsible for mistakes that they are not the cause of, suppliers would likely have less resistance to legitimate issues they are responsible for. But this excuse only goes so far.
As important as quick production has become, fixing problems fast is no less important. Suppliers if your current system of determining responsibility doesn’t move as fast as your regular orders, you will lose customers. If you need to “split hairs” to try to avoid responsibility – you will lose customers.
In reality, the stronger the partnership between distributor and supplier the better it is for everyone. If you build a reputation of fairness and never try to make a problem of your own making someone else's problem, you will find that when mistakes happen everyone will be working together to lessen the impact.
Gregg Emmer is chief marketing officer and vice president at Kaeser & Blair, Inc. He has more than 40 years experience in marketing and the promotional specialty advertising industry. His outside consultancy, providing marketing, public relations and business planning consulting to a wide range of other businesses, has been a useful knowledge base for K&B Dealers. Contact Gregg at gemmer@kaeser-blair.com.