Lowering Your Costs With Vendors While Building Relationships

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Lowering Your Costs With Vendors While Building Relationships

Vendors and fulfillment are critical to taking your product or service from concept to cash. These could be graphic designers, they could be web programmers, they could be fulfillment houses, they could be CD duplicators. There are all kinds of different types of vendors that you may come across in your business. Here are a few tips on how to build a quality relationship with these people and cut back on your fulfillment costs.

To get started, you can send them recommendations and referrals. I try and do this with anyone I work with because if I am able to give them more business, the value of my relationship with them goes much further. It changes the way they view me now because not only do I give them the business I use them for, but also the people I associate with. I will become more favorable then most clients. What you really have to look at is how you can benefit your vendors quickly and easily - giving them referrals is a great way to start.

I've also done joint venture projects with my vendors. Here's a quick scenario. One of the people that I was working with was a graphic designer. We decided to do a joint venture project together, where she would do the graphic design at no cost, I would provide the product and then put for the marketing effort, and together we would split the profits.

Boom! Just like that I had almost completely eliminated my cost up front and now don't have to worry about coming up with that money. Starting out, this was really helpful as I didn't have the money to put up front to hire a graphic designer. So this strategy is really great for that reason and many others.

Some people tell me, "Yeah, but Stu, you're giving away 50% of the profits. That's a big chunk of money." Well, time out for a second. I'm of the viewpoint that it's better to get your projects completed and making some money versus keeping all of nothing and not getting anything completed.

Instead of just letting those ideas sit on shelf, not making any money, I made an effort to approach and build a relationship with that specific vendor and was able to get those projects completed and off the shelf.

When you are on a tight marketing budget, you've got to get creative. And that is one creative idea that I've used. I've also used that with web developers.

The other thing that you can do to save a lot of money when you're working with vendors is do as much of the work as possible, ahead of time. You're saving the vendor time. You're saving them effort. You can ask them, perhaps, questions on how you could save money, how you could cut down their effort, cut down your overall project costs. These vendors will work with you. They'll help you. They know you have budgets to work within, and so they're always interested in working with you and trying to help you.

My last tip for now is instead of creating a completely new project design everytime, create a template to use. This way you can use it over and over again without having to pay your vendors again to do the same work. I'll tell you more about it in detail.

We will use developing e-Books for example. Instead of getting a graphic designer to design a specific layout for each of your e-Books you generate, it would be a lot easier and cheaper for you to get them to design a template. That way you can use that template for every e-Book you generate after that point instead of paying for it again.

Even though this may seem like a different approach, it will save you tons of money in the long run. For your graphic designer its about the same amount of effort, but saves you money. This is just another creative idea on how you can build quality relationships with your vendors but also save yourself a lot of money.

As you can see, these are just a few quick examples on how to both cut costs and build strong long lasting relationships with vendors and fulfillment companies. Once you start thinking outside of the box, many more strategies will come to you.

May ideas come to you when you need them most!

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More About Stu McLaren:
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