How to treat your suppliers.

Today I wanted to talk about how to treat your suppliers and the real truth on what happens if you push your luck to far.

Over the years I've come across hundreds of customers, all different from the stressed to the laid back, from the 6'8ft to the 5'2ft, the extremely organised to the extremely disorganised, the range of personalities is broad and all unique.

My post today makes you aware of how you treat your merchants, how it reflects on the service you get and the prices, now I have three customers (who will remain nameless):-

First customer is the most organised customer i have ever dealt with, his attention to detail is in no uncertain terms ridiculous, if on the rare occasion I get a price wrong he will e-mail me with the details and even the amount that's due to be credited.....with and without VAT.

This customer when he first walked into my branch had a folder of all the best prices he gets from three other merchants and basically said "if you beat the prices we will buy it from you" it was a big list and about 30% of the items i couldn't even get near but i managed it on 70%.

He is courteous, understanding, to the point and organised, the simplest customer to deal with and spends alot of money, if all my customers were like him i would have my nine working hours cut down to two.

My second customer is a plasterer and is unmanageable, not because he takes the mick or is loud or rude but because he constantly lies and tries his luck with prices, he puts words in my staffs mouths to try and get cheaper prices and conveniently forgets when a price is given. No matter how i try and approach his account my work gets undone every month, i caught him at the counter saying to the staff member that another merchant has offered multi finish £0.75p less than what we were selling it to him for, not an unreasonable statement? apart from i had already had this conversation 3 days ago with him and i had set the term up on his account, so my staff have been warned that prices won't be discussed and that if he does want to discuss prices then send him to my office.

Within three months of this rule being set he has seen me on 10 different occasions trying the same old trick, he doesn't spend much and says after each encounter that he will have to shop elsewhere, we still see him on a weekly basis and he still tries his luck.

The third customer spends as much as my first customer and when i made the comment of only working two hours if all were like him, well this customer takes the remaining seven hours, the most disorganised customer, we have been through the motions many many times when he starts a job, he brings in the plans, he asks if i can take them off, i explain I'm not a QS and that i don't have time, i send off the plans. He gets good prices because i set them from the start but if I'm off on holiday his service dips, not because we want his service to dip it's because he depends on us so much that if we lose one member of staff he doesn't get the attention. I'll be honest, if i see his name on caller ID i always look to the ceiling and say some profanities under my breathe.

It's not that i don't want his business or that he isn't a nice bloke it's because i have to do a large majority of his job and the worst part? if i construct a time frame call off for his materials imagine the frustration when his account goes on stop because he forgot to pay his bill, we had a big falling out one time and he went to another merchant for about 3 weeks, lets just say he came crawling back, i have 2 children and one of them is a young baby, the other is a 45 year old customer.

My point for this post is just be a little more organised, I'm not trying to come across as someone who is having a moan who works in a merchant but because this advice helps you, i have come across quite a few people who have said to a customer "no i can't add that extra item onto your delivery" when they can or "no i can't squeeze you in for a drop tomorrow" when push came to shove we can, there will be occasions when the most organised of customers need a big favour but your chances to have that favour delivered is alot greater if the big favours aren't constantly asked for.

I've said in a previous post that merchants want your business but make this decision alot easier for them, the tolerance levels may be alot higher today but there is still a limit.

You don't need to be customer one because as organised as i am i still wouldn't be able to hit his level if i was a tradesman but just taking the time to book your delivery in advance or picking up the materials that you can pick up in your van, these things don't go unnoticed by your merchant.

Finally i had rugby tickets to give away last week, who do think i took?