Is Your New Vendor Relationship Destined for Success? Or Bound for Failure?

It’s a scenario that’s all-too common for HR professionals in today’s “always on” world: You spent a huge amount of time, effort and resources on finding the perfect vendor, and finally, signed your contract.

You’re now in the honeymoon stage with your vendor: everything is new and fresh and wonderful…until something goes wrong.

What could you have done differently? How could you have set this relationship up for success right from the start?

With the amount of work that goes into the RFP process, it can be easy to assume the hardest part is over when your new vendor is officially chosen. But many times, the hard work is just beginning. You have to think about many factors, including:

• Onboarding successfully
• Setting up expectations and a measurement framework
• Communicating about your new vendor to your employees and leadership
• Establishing a path forward

We spend so much time looking in the rear-view mirror when it comes to vendor relationships: analyzing what could have been done better, backtracking to fix mistakes—the list goes on. Certainly, there are always going to be unforeseen circumstances and challenges, but we’re often so busy looking back that we’re not spending time looking forward, nurturing our new relationship.

Onboarding a new vendor and ensuring you’re on the path to a mutually beneficial relationship is no easy feat, but it’s critical to both you and your vendor’s future success. By setting up a plan for onboarding new vendors, you can establish a strong path towards partnership, and ensure both parties understand the expectations for the relationship.

Based on our years of onboarding and working with vendors at Businessolver, we recently developed a guide for HR professionals to help them through the new vendor onboarding and relationship building process. This guide addresses critical relationship management issues, such as:

• The challenges of onboarding a new vendor
• How to incorporate quality management best practices into your vendor relationship
• How to communicate vendor changes and onboarding to your corporate leadership
• The key markers of a successful relationship
• 5 tips for establishing and managing your relationship

Have some great tips for onboarding vendors? We’d love to hear them! Click to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and join the conversation.