How Promotional Gifts Enhance Your Supplier Relationship Management Strategy
Supplier relationships play a vital role in the success of your company. Suppliers are responsible for providing a steady flow of your raw materials and other resources to keep the business going. Keeping a positive working relationship with them will help streamline logistics and prevent production delays and lost sales. There are several ways to strengthen your relationship with your suppliers. One of them is by adding promotional gifts into your supplier relationship management strategy. This article will list some unique gift ideas and how promotional gifts can improve your supplier relations.
Unusual Promotional Gifts
The most common corporate gift items are T-shirts, caps, bags, and mugs. However, if you want to take it to another level, consider sending unique or unusual items.
Merchandise-branding company Steel City says adding novelty to your marketing campaigns to adds more personality that can make your brand more favourably remembered. Here are some examples of unusual promotional gift items:
- Mobile ring lights
- Colour-changing products
- Innovative gadgets, such as a light-up power bank or a bamboo speaker
Unique corporate gifts help you stand out and promote brand recall.
These gifts serve as free advertisements for your business whenever the recipients see or use them. Your vendors will see your logo and easily remember your brand.
Customising gifts can help send an even better message. It increases the value of your gifts because of the added effort you put into them. According to a 2021 study from McKinsey & Company, people associate customisation with positive experiences. When you send customised gifts, you show that you’re invested in the relationship and not just the transaction.
If you don’t know where to start with customisation, look into novel branded merchandise design ideas and examples online. These can be your inspiration when designing and producing promotional gifts for your business.
3 Ways Promotional Items Improve Supplier Relationship
Here are some of the ways promotional items help improve your relationship with suppliers:
Establish Trust With New Vendors
Trust is an essential element when partnering with suppliers. You definitely want to work with reliable suppliers who can guarantee consistent quality. With dependable suppliers, you can ensure that the consumers get the best products from you, leading to more sales.
But trust is a two-way street, and you also want your suppliers to know that you’re a trustworthy partner. Sending promotional gifts can help with this. These gifts show that you’re not just always looking to strike a good deal but also want to build a long-term relationship with them. Corporate gift-giving helps promote mutual dependence.
It’s also important to take note of certain ethical issues when giving and receiving corporate gifts. After all, there’s a fine line between gift-giving and bribery. Always observe organisational and legal rules when sending promotional gifts to vendors. They should be reasonable and proportionate to the occasion, not lavish and over the top. All costs should also be properly recorded and accounted for.
Create Goodwill
In business, it’s not good practice to send rush or urgent orders to your suppliers, especially if it’s not part of their contract and even more so if you don’t have a good relationship with them. For instance, if you have a restaurant and experience an unexpected surge in orders, you’ll need more ingredients immediately. If you’re not your supplier’s priority when this happens, they might refuse to accommodate your demand.
Sending promotional gifts can help you avoid this. Promotional gifts create goodwill, so your suppliers are more likely to respond positively when you ask them for a favour.
Appreciate Their Contribution
When partnering with suppliers, a little appreciation won’t hurt, especially if they consistently deliver timely services or materials. Even if they don’t expect it, appreciating their contribution to your company’s growth might motivate them to cooperate better in future transactions.
Why not give them a branded gift as a token of your appreciation? For instance, your website hosting partner may have been providing nothing but only the best services for years. Giving them a thank-you gift would show how much you appreciate their consistent efforts. And who knows? They might give you discounts on future services just because of this small gesture on your end!
Summing It Up
Ultimately, strengthening supplier relationships is crucial to the success of your business. A company’s growth is directly tied to its ability to provide quality products and services at an affordable price. Maintaining and improving your market standing requires strong relationships with suppliers who provide raw materials, other resources, and services.
Using promotional gifts to strengthen these relationships makes working with suppliers easier for your company. It is even more helpful when you suddenly experience a surge in customer orders and run out of stock. By sending a little token, they’ll see that they’re appreciated and will likely want to help out more. This can help optimise your warehouse operations and stabilise your supply chain.
Improve your supplier relationship management skills with IoSCM. A professional qualification in Procurement and Supply will enable you to build longevity in your career. Call 0800 1422 522 today.