Getting your products and services from concept to cash you need vendors and fulfillment. Anyone from web programmers, fulfillment houses, graphic designers. Whatever type of vendors you may need to use in your business this article will outline a few tips about how you can lower your fulfillment costs while building quality relationships.
One great way to build your relationship with someone is to send them as many referrals as you can. By sending them recommendations and referrals they will see your relationships as having more value then just someone they do business with. When I do this with the vendors I work with I am now not only benefiting them by giving them business but by also bringing more business to them. This puts me in a much more favorable light then most of their costumers. You want to give them as many benefits as quickly as possible - sending referrals is a very easy method to do so.
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.
Just like that I saved myself a ton of money! The costs for a graphic designer were gone and when I was first starting out I used this strategy a lot because I simply didn't have the money to put down for elements like that.
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.
If I wasn't willing to work on building that relationship with that vendor, that project would have never been completed. If I didn't get that project done I would be making no money from it. Instead that project would remain in the pile of possible ideas, bringing in no profit.
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.
Another idea is to create a template versus a one-off project, so that you can use it over and over again without incurring more costs each time. Let me explain that in a little detail.
We'll use an e-Book as an example. Instead of getting your graphic designer to design a specific layout for your one e-Book, why don't you just get them to design a template you can use to every other e-Book you develop?
This is a different way about going things - the thing is you will save tons of money - thousands - in the long-run. As for the graphic designer its about the same amount of effort for them to put forth. This is just another idea about how you can again build your relationships with your vendors, but also save a lot of money.
Your vendors and fulfillment companies can really make a difference in your business and these are just a few ideas on how you can build your relationship with them and also cut costs. More strategies will come to you if you only start thinking outside the box!
May ideas come to you when you need them most!
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