10 Ways to Capitalize on Your Vendor Conversations
Vendor conversations can lead to a host of unexpected outcomes that can make getting to steps murkier than they should be. Here’s how I ensure deals move towards a desirable outcome at every vendor interaction.
If your day-to-day is anything like mine, then you spend half of it on the phone talking to companies who might be able to help you solve a unique customer problem. While only a fraction of those calls might lead to the contract stage, the real value is what I learn from them. During a call I might only get a better understanding of how a new service operates on the back-end, maybe I’ll get a new LinkedIn connection, but, I’m almost always able to understand the fintech landscape better after asking some high-level questions about a partner’s solutions. Because having better conversations lead to better products and at a quicker time to market, then it’s paramount that I will be talking to the right people who can offer the most value.
My charter as the Arival Partnerships Lead is to onboard the most innovative, hottest, fintechs that make the world smaller through what I see as the next fintech trend — — embedded solutions. According to Andreesen-Horowitz, embedding tools into the technologies that people are already using increases the profitability per customer by over 5X the original revenue stream. To paint that vision for you in real life, what’s stopping Facebook from becoming PCI compliant, adding a core to Messenger and Whatsapp, and creating a Payments button from inside a messaging app (or what used to be just a messaging app). In the next phase of fintech’s evolution, unless you’re a blockchain innovator it’s less about creating something new, and more about creating innovative distribution channels that make sharing financial information easier.
But whether it’s 1920 or 2020, adding the next iteration of fintech innovation to Arival’s platform starts with conversations, not 0s and 1s no matter how high-tech you might consider yourself. As long as you go into each exploratory conversation with a learn-first, do business second, attitude then you’ll be on the path to thought leadership, a better product, and creating a seamless payments future in no time.
So let’s get to it! Here are 10 actionable ways that I use to capitalize on my partner conversations.
If I was writing about the one way to improve your vendor conversations then this would be it. Did you ever get a vague email asking you to devote 2 hours of your day to a task that doesn’t seem to align with your current priorities? That’s because the requester failed to inform you of the task’s context in relation to what’s normally expected. While you don’t need to go into too much detail during a partner conversation, you can offer some background about your company and offer vital details about your company’s problem to give them the best shot at solving it for you. Getting to the “why” behind what you’re working towards early in the conversation will make for more effective, quicker, follow-ups and keep everyone on the same page. So remember, good business requires good context.
In the same way, the teleprompter helps politicians come off as seasoned orators, the virtual conferencing world allows me to literally recite an off-the-cuff sounding explanation of where my company came from, our vision, and anything else I find myself often repeating. And since these are 2–10 minutes of a conversation I repeat over and over almost every day, why waste the effort by not having your background notes and important pitches written down ahead of time? The trick is that with enough practice your effort will come off extemporaneously like a late-night talk-show host’s monologue. Make your life easier, and cheat a little more. Invest in the time to script what you find yourself often repeating.
Have you ever signed-in to a video-chat and while the meeting software loads you find yourself querying your email to see what you spoke about 3 weeks ago? Picking key points from old conversation threads can be a time-waster, but writing down your conversation details during a call will make future follow-ups a breeze. Don’t waste an hour of time speaking with a partner if you don’t have somewhere accessible to store that valuable information. In my partnerships, Airtable is a Notes field where I can refer to past conversation details at a glance. It doesn’t matter if you use Excel or a filing cabinet, just write everything down somewhere that’s more easily referenceable than your email client or assuming that you’ll remember. Roll old conversations into new ones with an efficient note-taking system that works for you.
If you follow my advice and do step 3 correctly, then you know those notes can be messy, disorganized, and, frankly, hard to understand. Take note — -messy notes are worthless. Following step 3 without following step 4 is like trying to make s’mores with graham crackers and fire but without any chocolate and marshmallows. It doesn’t taste good and you’ll only have burnt graham cracker dust to show for it. So take some time after your call to arrange, title, and organize all that information. It’ll make your future conversations flow and come in handy when your boss asks you a specific question.
After a video-meeting, my team clicks out of the chat room before we can share feedback while it’s still fresh in our minds. So to share our feedback, we re-sync every week to turn those conversation recaps into strategy and product discussions, if not at least ask for advice about how to drive towards the next steps. At Arival my weekly syncs are slideshows arranged by product type where I note the stage and status of each partner conversation. A slide of mine might read: “Unionpay for Asia push-to-card, in onboarding status, next step is technical integration. Partner conversations are incredibly valuable, so create a mechanism for sharing that value.
There’s no better way to turn a 60-minute meeting into a 25-minute meeting than by turning solid company research into direct questions. Avoid picking someone’s brain or standing idly by during an endless feature demo by knowing ahead of time exactly what you need to know. Recently I spoke with a compliance provider that offers identity screening and KYB tools but Arival already employed an identity provider. After introductions and background, I promptly told the partner we were only interested in the KYB piece because we already used an identity provider. State your needs directly or risk losing valuable time being sold something you already have. We all deserve an extra hour in our day.
I recommend using tools like Slack’s shared channels and Telegram to make your partners as accessible as your own mother. It’s a great way to get answers to quick pedestrian questions without cluttering someone’s inbox. Recently, after hours of work, my compliance lead thought she lost all her uploaded due diligence documentation to a partner’s account after the system glitched and asked her to sign in again. To verify whether the information was lost, I sent a Telegram to my guy and had an answer in 2 minutes, not a day by going through email. That same partner and I routinely schedule same-day check-ins to review deal progress. So get in the habit of sharing your Telegram or Signal on your calls or in your email signature. Make your partners more like your personal friends and leave an email to less timely formal communication.
If you already knew everything, then you wouldn’t need to schedule a conversation in the first place. So be mindful that you’re talking to the expert during a partner conversation and lean in to that experience. I used to work at TransferWise so I can easily have a complex cross-border discussion about liquidity, service jurisdictions, and currency routes. Debit card program manager discussions aren’t nearly as intuitive for me so I have to raise my hand often in those calls for clarity. So get comfortable asking for explanations about products you think might help you.
Once conversations conclude, always have a next step to tackle. If you and your partner are comfortable with each other post-discovery, the next steps are typically asking for an NDA and beginning the due diligence process. Other sensible next steps might include a demo call along with other team members, asking for sandbox credentials, or gathering a list of third-party databases or other information a partner’s tool might access. It’s not uncommon that I fall in love with a product, but don’t know how to move forward in relation to our other pending priorities. In that case, re-read step #5 and re-sync with your team to plot a path forward. Don’t confuse the means, conversations, with the end, creating an innovative tool that makes our customers’ lives better. Getting to the next steps keeps the focus on getting to market for our customers’ benefit.
So you’ve landed on a tool that solves a headache, you know how it works, you have buy-in from your team, so all that’s left is to sign the contract and pay the vendor whatever they want, right? Not exactly. While a vendor’s price might seem firm, no tool requiring as much buy-in and exploratory diligence as a banking service has a price set-in-stone. So create some variable projections and adjust any fixed component up and down to land at your desired yearly price as a goal to negotiate towards. For example, you might want to pay more on a per screening basis than the vendor is charging in exchange for a reduction in fixed dollar terms. Or, maybe you’re willing to spend more overall in exchange for a reduction in the contract’s term length. A huge sales secret is that salespeople love having an offer, any offer, in hand. It shows that you’re serious, can act in good faith, and it provides a launching pad for negotiations. The vendor partner might be only $25,000 away from a quarterly sales record when they’re asking for $50,000 and might be willing to sell you the tool for $35,000. You never know, so ask!
Conclusion
As the partnerships buyer, my job is to turn conversational wet cement into a solid support system upon which we can rest our product. Hopefully, my insights surrounding context, systems, and conversation tools help you create your own unique system for getting the most out of your partner discussions.
