How to communicate your business needs to your suppliers and partner companies efficiently
Developing clear, prompt and responsive channels of communication with your suppliers and key business partners is essential to the success of your business operations. Getting your metaphoric ship to sail smoothly though is prone to be challenging and finicky.
Many external challenges will affect these strategic partnerships. They can be economic or financial waves of turbulence such as prolonged international shipping delays, increased import taxation and reduced sourced workforce availability. All these will affect the timing, quality/pricing of your products and services by undermining the underlying required supply you need. This ultimately affects your own goodwill reputation and bottom line margins.
To navigate out of these troubled waters you will need to communicate problems, directives and solutions efficiently with partners. You don’t want to be shouting to yourself unheard and muted by the winds while at the helm during a storm at sea.
Even during times of clear waters, many internal challenges can equally stem from communication misalignment at different stages of operations that could prove to be just as serious threats to the business. For instance while sourcing, contract/terms negotiating, ordering, producing, quality control, maintenance, marketing, sales, after sales, & follow-up..
The need for good communication lines with partners is clear.
But in this article we will simply touch upon ‘briefly’ 3 major points of concern to tackle potential improvements and we will be discussing what to avoid plus what are good recommendations and practices.
I will categorize the points by different business activities.
Sourcing Physical Products Considerations
Location and language. English is the most widely used language in the business world. Keyword here is most not ‘the only’. While most companies you will source goods from can communicate with you in English, many will only be able to do so in broken primitive English. Best case in point would be Chinese companies in Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Shanghai. While most companies will have one person or two on board that can speak with you, it will not be the common English you are used to either. It will be distinctly different. This is not a big deal if you are sourcing an existing product, but if you are creating your own novel one, then it is a different league. Fret not too much tho, you got a couple of options to help you deal with this.
Contract translators. This can be very helpful on physical trips, but very costly if you depend on their services remotely often. Also mind you that you might have some communication issues with the translators themselves if their command of English is not sufficient and/or they don’t understand the business itself they are translating for.
Contract third party middlemen companies run by westerners. For the long term this is a good option as you will have a team of Westerners and local Chinese that interface between you and the supplier and do more than just translate for you. Not only will they master both sides of the communication tunnel English/Chinese(Mandarin, Cantonese), with time they will also understand your business in detail which will improve the communication flow immensely.
Figure it out yourself. This means to learn to understand how the other party ‘uses’ English plus to do your best to find and work with companies who have the ‘best’ English speaking sales people. This is not easy nor the recommended way, but it doesn’t cost extra. It will cost you extra though when miscommunication happens and they produce for you a unicorn when you wanted a new bicycle. Proceed at your own peril. The corrective back and forth associated with this is unpleasant and wasteful. The best way to do this depends on you honestly, since you can do what some successful businessmen already did and learn the supplier’s native tongue such as Mandarin/Cantonese instead of depending on your counterpart to learn better English. This applies to other countries as well in Europe where there aren’t many who speak English, but since we are talking about physical goods the odds are high you will be communicating with Chinese companies at one point or another as it is the word’s current sourcing juggernaut.
Now since the realistic odds aren’t high that you will learn another language any time soon just for that purpose, your second distant option is to repeat your points many times over to them. Drill it into them what you want/mean. Repeat yourself even if it takes 10 times til they finally get it.
You simply can’t put Purchase Orders if you are not confident you will get what you asked and paid for.
Also supplement verbal communication with written requests for future reference in case of likely miscommunications. Once the medium of communication is stabilized you need to agree clearly with your suppliers on your order specifications for the deliverables and do follow-up quality control checks. Visual mediums helps also here, send and receive photos, sketches to clarify you communicated. Go high or low tech, just be sure it’s done properly.
Once they figure out what you need and how to do it, all this becomes less a problem for you, you will just place an order and receive what you need.
Sourcing Software Considerations
The success of this business communication category is very dependent on the agreed scope initially. This is the most important thing to communicate to your provider. Agree and put it in contract. Then follow-up on it verbally and in a written fashion. Do not accept to let someone start work for you developing a website, mobile application or micro controller code without being totally clear on what you expect to be delivered and how exactly.
Account for projected deliverables and timeline keystones, revision numbers, different channels of communications for feedback/notes/requests, how the live deployment rollout will be exactly including if need be the performance benchmarks, scalability, security, documentation, testing, training, handover responsibilities.. to setting up of server accounts and their ownership.
Keep a written record for all of this and make sure the initial verbal and contract agreement goes over all this. Since this is a software source, odds are low in this industry that English itself will be a bottleneck or a show stopper in the communication. But if many of these guidelines are not followed and you do business mostly on goodwill, you will most likely run into issues with your software provider, from scope creep, to delayed timelines, misaligned deliverables, eventually leading to angry meetings, penalties and legal action.
Clearly if things reach this point there will be no more repeat business and the possibility of bad business outcomes affecting the reputation of everybody.
This brief foray into potential software sourcing communication issues covers the perspective of you being the buyer, later we can cover the opposite perspective of you being a provider in another article. Many points will be similar to these.
Marketing, Sales Communication
If business communication for sourcing products and software is delicate and needs planning, communicating to successfully cover Marketing and Sales affairs is more akin to removing mines from a minefield.
The reason for this is the ever shifting changing aspect of it, the many different possible strategies and executions, the challenging market events to closely account for and meticulously follow up with. In addition there is a considerable amount of jargon that you need to understand to communicate with those departments effectively. This level of challenge is similar whether you are working with an external or internal team. This is especially true if you have not yet figured out yet your optimal sales and marketing strategies.
For marketing, you need to be able to communicate and understand what their plans are to comment on them or ask for changes if they don’t align with your general business logic. You will need to be able to look into numbers for insights as this is a data driven field.
Arm yourself with knowledge of Brands, Value Propositions, Segmentation and Positioning, Campaigns/Promotions and Content Calendars.. the Why/Who/What of the business and products. The live trends on social media and offline tradition marketing. The analytics reporting tools and CRMs with leads, conversions and deals. If you are not familiar, you and them will be speaking totally different languages.
If you think can resolve this by interacting directly with the teams of such departments, this will very quickly inundate you with information that will not be obvious to you on how it could be actually helpful.
So the best strategy here is to deal directly with the team leads of each.
They will summarize in meetings, reports and presentations everything.
You will still need to understand like we said initially almost all of their jargon, but you will be communicating at a macro level instead of a micro level on this. The appeal is always there to go low level with the team, but it is misleading, if you usually wouldn’t dare to discuss with engineers optimal algorithms and design patterns, know that the people in marketing and sales are also dealing with other high degrees of work complexities.
Granted, if your background is already from these 2 fields, this will be a different story for you, you might be able to go micro with them technically, but whether or not that is still a wise move would be a different thing.
I know we missed a few important categories such as Legal Communication (think lawyers, contracts, regulations..), Financial Communication (think banks, accounting firms..) and Meeting Etiquette (On time, preparing goals before setting up meeting, time-boxing it..) but regardless of the category, for effective partner business communication you always have to keep in mind in addition to what we discussed the bigger overall culture of the companies you are talking with.
For example:
-How responsive and punctual they are, or not. East and West companies are different.
-How direct/open or not they are when communicating. Some will not steer away 1 mm from the initial script, while others adapt to your queries and needs. Some will sugar coat their response or deflect tihngs, others will be very direct.
-What might be considered offensive or acceptable. For example asking for extra work to be done. Or speaking to some companies with an aggressive tone when they fail to deliver.
-Timing issues. Don’t message people in companies at 10am while it is 3am on their local time.
-If they work/reply during off hours or not.
-If they can speak a third language in common with you
-What software they most use. As some use email mostly, while others Wechat or Whatsapp.
At this stage we will need to wrap up. We went over some of the major points but not all. That would require further articles if not books.
But what we wanted to highlight from this article is that communicating with your suppliers of services/products and business partners is equally as important as your communication with your clients and teams.
You can’t take that lifeline for granted. It’s not a fire and forget situation where your partners will simply figure it out by themselves.
And depending on your own role in the business, to enhance your business communication you will have to push yourself constantly to learn to don many hats and switch mental and verbal context very quickly depending on who are speaking with. You definitely need to learn more about the work being done, to strive to be diplomatic in the face of regular adversity, to find smart approaches to resolve things in peace and clearly draw out the plan ahead concisely for everybody.
To make it more concrete, these points would apply equally at different levels to project planners, operations managers, and procurement officers i believe.
Hope this was a helpful read.
PS:
This is one article from a three-parts series on corporate communication. The follow-up articles will cover how to communicate with your manager and how to communicate with staff and team.