Assigning Scores In The Partner Dashboard

Vendor Leadership Management is a big deal, folks. If you aren't clear about how your vendor team should support you, your vendor team will support you in a way that is most beneficial to individual vendors, right?

Each month, you update your entire vendor team on their comparative overall status.

In the email sent to every vendor, every employee in your department, and every member of your Executive Team, you give specific praise to the top 20% of the list ... in our case, the top three (Social Media Agency, Email Service Provider, Pay-Per-Click Vendor). Be specific about what each group is doing well ... your Social Media Agency is providing the best customer service ... your Email Service Provider increased company profit ... your pay-per-click vendor ramped-up the performance of winning new items (makes sense). Tell everybody what these folks are doing well.

I would not spend time on the bottom three in the list, publicly at least. I'd just let the two co-ops and the affiliate vendor sit there, at the bottom, for all to see. Trust me, your vendor partners are going to pay close attention to the partners that land in the relegation zone (bottom three).

Only six of sixteen vendors earned Net Scores > 50%. That's not acceptable. Make sure your team understands what your expectations truly are.

Privately, I would contact the bottom three vendors, and clearly explain why their performance is not acceptable. I would clearly explain what they have to do in order to improve. I would explain what happens if performance does not improve. If you're not going to do anything different with the vendors at the bottom of the table, well, then don't even bother with this framework. The framework is designed to help your vendors improve their performance so that your business generates increased sales and increased profit.

Make sense?

Tomorrow, we'll dive into an example of evaluating a specific vendor.