Is Your Company the Fighter Big Corporations Need?
The questions you should ask
yourself before seeking to form Strategic Partnerships with large corporations
are: Do I have a solution that a corporation would say is valuable to them? Do
I sell my products and services the way my target corporate client buys
it? Do I have a solution that my
customer - a corporate client - would say they value, and am I offering my
product and service the way they buy it - not am I selling it the way I want to
sell it? Am I offering it the way they buy it; the way they go to market to get
it? To further expound on these
questions, also consider the following: “Can I
demonstrate that I am the exception and I can do better than what my
competition is doing?”
Is
your company the fighter big corporations need? What do I mean by that you may ask? This really and
truly falls under the category of if you continue to do what you've always
done, then you're going to get what you've always gotten.
Big corporations push
themselves to look for new ways of doing things that end up becoming more cost
effective in terms of generating more revenue,
lowering costs, increasing profitability -- the same as what you should be
doing in your company. It’s less about are they using the same people and doing
what they've always done. It's more ofdo they have a stable set of suppliers,
contractors and vendors that can deliver continuous improvement to their
organization?
For example, if a buyer
bought an item for a dollar today, can they buy it for 97 cents tomorrow? If
the total cost is a dollar, then can I bring the total cost down to 95 cents?
The price might actually go up from 75 cents to 80 cents, but the total cost
went from a dollar to 95 cents. We're
going to talk a lot more about total cost a little later on, but what I want
you to take from the example is the concept of what is the approach that you as
a supplier, as a potential provider of goods and services to a large
corporation need to bring to the table. That approach is a fresh way of looking
at things. You must get your company into a position where you have a fresh way
of looking at the problem you solve -- so that your size, your skillset, your
efficiency, your knowledge of the business allow for the exact same job to be
done at lower cost. This is a huge value for a large corporate client.
The reality is that because
diverse suppliers have different life experiences, we see the world
differently, so we challenge the way things have always been done. We always
challenge the status quo. We always think there's got to be a better way. If we
do this the same way everybody else has done it, then we’re not going to get
any farther ahead, so we’ve got to do something differently than the way
everybody has done it. It's in our DNA to approach things differently. “There's
got to be a better way to do something” is exactly the skillset that large
corporations are looking for and, quite frankly, that they need.
Without innovation, we'd all
still have Ford Model T automobiles. We would never have gotten airbags,
antilock brakes, power steering. We'd still have the Model T and auto
manufacturing would have never changed. It's almost like the rubber band. There
has not been a whole lot of innovation in the rubber band since one of the
first ones were made. I mean, yes they come in different sizes, but they do
pretty much the same thing. But that's about it. Cars do different things.
Airplanes do different things. Televisions do different things. Cell phones, my
goodness, consider the first cell phone compared to what we have right now. I
mean, just innovation on top of innovation on top of innovation.
I'll give you an example. One
of the companies that I used to buy from was a chemical company and what was
interesting about this chemical company was there were a whole host of chemical
distributors out there, but this company was smaller, it was a woman-owned
business. She just all of a sudden said, you know, there's got to be a better
way to bring products in at lower cost. There's got to be a way to blend
product on-site. There's got to be a way to do a whole host of things regarding
chemicals that nobody's doing. That was an innovation that she brought to the
market. And hers is one of the largest chemical distribution companies in the
US. She started her business with only $5,000 in her pocket and her company is
now a nine-figure company, and growing.
I’ll give you an additional
example from my company. We were pursuing a large contract and we saw where
there were innovations that we had that could work within the target company's
accounting system. They had these huge enterprise resource planning or ERP
systems - things like SAP and other big accounting systems. There are lot of
rules involved in those, but those rules don't often coincide with what a big
customer needs, so one of the things that we were able to do was just say “Hey,
we still have simple processes. We can take what our big partner does and make
it simpler so that it fits in with their processes”.
This is the kind of
innovative thinking that will help you land lucrative contracts with large
corporations. In conclusion, ensure that you have a viable proposal that will
reduce cost and increase profitability when you solicit contracts from large
corporations.
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