How to Deal with Those Big Guys - Buying from Them
How to Deal with Those Big Guys - Buying from Them
Many traders target those big companiesas their potential suppliers or even customers, and hoping to get significant profit from it. It may be true but there is a significant number of challenges and considerations on the way. We will go through some of these challenges and will highlight some problems from the other side, i.e. from the side of a distributor. We will indicate some most common mistakes and problems encountered by applicants, so that you are better equipped when you approach a large company in your industry next time.
As a general rule, no matter what you trade, it is good to have access to more than one supplier. This obviously allows to have both larger variety of products at any given time, and better prices. Even if you already have an account with what you believe is the best supplier in your industry or region, it makes sense to constantly monitor the market for finding other suppliers and always have a choice of them. In practice, as a trader you always look for other companies, not only for new potential customers but for new potential suppliers. Sometimes they may overlap. Search for companies is a constant process, and for good traders it is very important to develop efficient technics for finding and researching companies.
FINDING THEM
First of all how to find them? Well, there is a number of obvious options in every country, companies that everybody know about, such as Gem, Koch, CentreSoft in the UK, for example. There are many otherdistributors and wholesalers almost as large or may be smaller, and it is obviously worth approaching them too. Internet is undoubtedly the main source of information for searching companies today. Many of the companies would have websites where you can get the first hand information about them. Amazingly, many of these large companies may have very simple, unattractive websites, which luck any high tech sophistication and proper design. It is surprising to see how little attention some of the wholesalers and distributors pay to their presence in the Internet. Nowadays it is getting difficult to judge how good a company is, based only on its website. It is easy to build a fancy website and many, even very small traders may afford quite good looking professional websites, in opposite to some of these large companies who still use their websites, designed probably by the then CEO's student cousin back in 1993.
In addition to companies website, there are many other resources that can provide valuable information about companies, your potential vendors, such as industry and sector associations, for example, or the company house database, yellow pages and business directories, as well as many other online resources. There are also many specific discussion forums in the Internet, with members who are small and medium size traders like you, who share their experience and opinion in dealing with specific wholesalers and distributors. Recently the social networking sites, especially Linkedin are becoming very good for getting additional information about companies. There is a wealth of information in the Internet. In most cases, you can even do a cross-check, i.e. compare information about the same company from different sources. Significant discrepancies should be alarming. Unfortunately there are many companies or individuals in this particular industry who would like to pretend larger and more significant than they are in reality. Contacting and dealing with such traders would be a waste of time in the best case. In worse case there are many fraudsters out there too. It is a good idea to do a proper research and some diligence before contacting potential suppliers.
CONTACTING THEM
Once you shortlisted companies that you would be willing to use as suppliers, it is time to contact them. Most of them would have a sales e-mail address for contacting them. Frist impression is very important, and a well written professional message is paramount for making that good impression. Your message should include at least the following components. (1) greeting; (2) statement of objective, i.e. the reason you contact them; at tnhis point your objective should be opening an account with them and receiving their stock list and prices; (3) finally your message should includebrief information about your company. The latest is the most important, because large companies may receives dozens of e-mails with various requests every day, and messages from applicants that do not bother to properly introduce themselves have way less chances to be responded. An e-mail message from a Hotmail account, which would only say "hi I was wandering if i can open account with yourselves." could be quite irritating and have very little chances to be responded. In oposite to that a well structured and professionally written letter with clear statment of the objectives, allneccessary information about the sender will undoubtedly be treated with more respect. The information about you should ideally include your name, the name and address of your company, phone numbers, type of your company, are you an online trader, a brick and mortar retailer, or wholesaler, which countries do you trade in, how many outlets do you have, and an approximate estimation of product - games and console that you would buy per month. If you can provide all this information in your first message, it will quite positively make you different from most of the other messages that they receive during the day. A very good idea is to have an e-mail signature with your company's logo, name, address, phone number, website, etc. It looks very professional. Keep it short though, a message with multiple pages would not make the reader very happy. In fact it makes little chances that would be read at all.
APPLICATION
Once they find you suitable, most of the large distributors and wholesalers would require filling in their application form for setting up an account. If they are satisfied with your initial request, they will e-mail you their application form. Some of them may require submission of some supporting documents in addition to filling in their application form, such as your company and your VAT registration certificates, a letter from your company director with a request to open an account, etc. You will need to fill in the application form, sign, and fax it to them or e-mail a scan. At that point you may be assigned an account manager in the company, where you are applying, who will be dealing with you. It may take several days before they set up an account, and finally, oh miracle! you will receive an e-mail informing that your account has been set up. What happens next will be described in our next Chapter, which is yet to come.
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