Donkey and Carrot in modern corporate life

What can you do with a current vendor who is not part of your future vendor strategy road map?

Vendor management strategy is composed by complex set of actions based on basic principles and tactics. You have a current scenario, and you define future set of alliances with respect your portfolio of assets. Nothing new here.

Vendors behavior is simple, they are hungry of opportunities, new contracts and you have to feed them in some way or other. In your list of vendors, you have preferred vendors and non-preferred vendors.

You have a vendor who is strongly working with you but that for some reason is not part of your future vendor future picture. The situation is:

  • You cannot ignore it, you have risk exposure and need this vendor to continue being committed with you.
  • You do not want to award this vendor with new big contract.
  • The vendor knows very well their area of influence and they are so much competitive in such area, you have to erode their competitiveness.
  • They are starving to continue working with you and in their plans they want to increase their presence on your portfolio.

Which tactics should you put in place to drive this vendor?

  • Ignore them, give the message at top level with indirect actions.
  • Is a risk to do not invite the vendor to the new RFPs? Invite them, add requirements to the RFPs that excludes it, or add specific data with low influence on the rating for gathering information for free.
  • Open renegotiation discussions of current contracts: look for opportunities for savings, take the control of the understanding of the real TCO of your assets.
  • Keep active communication speech with the vendor: “you are strategic partner, we want you being part of our future”.
  • Keep the vendor busy with “strategic” information required for future coming discussions: “I want to renegotiate this strategic contract, before to start discussing it, give me this data, this other info…”.
  • any other suggestion?
Carrot-and-donkey
Carrot and donkey in modern corporate life: keep your enemy busy, how? fulfilling excels.

 

 

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