Your Brand to Suppliers

Chapter 2, Part 2 - Corporate Brand Personality

Today, it is not only consumers who have a choice of who to buy from. As suppliers we also have a choice on who we want to work with or partner with. In an age when people are focused more on positive energy, well-being and good life balance, there is more of a tendency to adopt the? ‘life is too short’ way of thinking and avoid the unnecessary negative factors where possible.? Therefore, in a business to business company, if you are difficult to work with, you may find that not only do good suppliers not want to work with you, but that they will be more likely to talk about the negative experience to their professional colleagues too.

Your suppliers usually run businesses themselves of course, with their own set of customers and stakeholders. It’s worth noting that they can become brand ambassadors for you, given a consistent and positive experience of working with your company from all angles. Or of course, can equally speak negatively about you to their network.

As a supplier I find that when dealing with the back-office departments, generally people either just do what they need to do to ‘do their job’, or fall short of what they need to do. There can often be little apparent appreciation for the fact that they are an important part of the company brand too. I frequently experience a lack of accountability, responsibility, seeing through an issue to conclusion, or general collaboration and teamwork compared with their colleagues in more frontline roles.?

Case Study

Our team had been working with the Head of Learning & Development for a large global organisation on defining a suitable personal branding and executive presence programme for senior managers. Walking TALL was the solution they wanted and we had finally got to a stage of rollout.? Through this whole process, the communication was professional, consistent, responsive and very respectful on both sides.

Then it came to dealing with the accounts payable department when the first invoice was submitted. A whole new relationship scenario was experienced. In fact, it was like dealing with a completely different company and set of corporate values. Had these people gone through a totally separate induction process into the organisation, or perhaps had had no training on corporate values at all? The communication stopped – firstly we couldn’t get a response from them to confirm that the invoice was in their system. When it became overdue, we still could not elicit a response. We have a process that we go through in our business when invoices are not paid, but we prefer to have a voice-to-voice conversation and establish what the issue might be before going down the route of issuing late payment invoices. When we finally did get a response to messages and emails, the people involved (and yes there were several), consistently didn’t do what they said they would do and had to be chased at every communication point.

Now a repetitive attitude of unaccountability and unresponsiveness like this is no coincidence nor is it isolated – it is indicative of a culture in that department, and possibly in a wider part of the company. In fact, a culture of blame is often apparent in these situations. Not a great brand message to project to the outside world and we find it is sadly all too common.

This of course had the effect of completely tainting our view of that company’s brand. Unfortunately, this is the brand that is remembered rather than the more positive one that we had consistently experienced with the heads of Learning & Development and Human Resources. The experience that causes the most pain is the one that sticks with us. Of course, this is one that also gets talked about and potentially written about! It would be a worthwhile exercise to find out what your suppliers feel and say about your company to their contacts – why not ask them?

INTERNAL CULTURE

This type of culture that breeds within a team or department or sometimes even company-wide, is described well by Steve Simpson , creator of UGRs – Unwritten Ground Rules. UGRs, he says, can be best described with this example of an employee’s mind-set, as one of many:

‘The company talks about good customer service, but we know they don’t really mean it, so we don’t really have to worry about it’.

Another could be ‘Nobody else bothers to respond to or speak to suppliers chasing invoices, so why should I?

Often, of course, these ways of thinking are subconscious for the individual involved, and that’s what sadly builds the culture. ?People tend to copy or sub-consciously reflect or mirror the behaviours of others without thinking and then it becomes a habit and the attitude of ?‘it’s just the way things are done around here’ starts to stick. How about the employee who always turns up to work late? If this appears not to be dealt with by management, it will most certainly encourage a culture of apathy amongst others about time keeping and resentment towards that member of staff. Could this be true of your organization?? Do you really check?

As Steve Simpson says, ‘It is the UGRs that drive people’s behaviour – incredibly, these are rarely, if ever, discussed openly.

In another example, we had developed a very positive relationship with the business development director of a small business consultancy, and were focused on jointly developing and delivering a successful programme to one of their clients. All was going very well indeed. Again, when it got to dealing with other members of staff, in this case within the legal department of the business regarding the contract, things went downhill rapidly. It was again like dealing with a different company and with people who had a completely incongruent perspective on what the company values were.? In this instance, we chose to pull out of this business partnership due entirely to the mismatch of values with our own and the inconsistency of staff behaviours in the back-office. ?The trust had disappeared, so it was not going to work long-term.

The inconsistencies in these types of experiences are precisely where companies need to place focus and attention. If an experience is not consistent, it causes us as suppliers or customers to question the integrity of the company and we start to mistrust. This also serves to dramatically dilute all the great work that your front-line employees do to build effective and positive relationships that get talked about. Unfortunately, the only thing talked about now is the negative behaviours, which spread, across social media too.

You may have a focus on communicating the customer brand promise, and the attitudes and behaviours expected from employees to deliver on that promise, especially customer-facing staff. While it is clearly beneficial to the organisation for employees to understand their responsibilities in delivering the customer brand promise, the effectiveness of initiatives to reinforce this can often be short-lived if the brand values on which the service experience is founded are not experienced internally by the employees in their interactions with the organization.

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