Identifying a great supplier requires a notable investment of time and energy on the part of key stakeholders and their supporters for both the sponsor and supplier. Capabilities presentations, RFPs, bid defenses, reference examinations, financial health checks, contract reviews and negotiations all require diligence and effort, time and financial investment. Upon award, it can be easy to lose momentum and we can fail to fully realize the incredible potential between supplier and sponsor. Once these steps are completed, the real work of identifying and developing the synergies begins.
Partner vs. Supplier
The process for deploying a supplier’s services is well understood and can become routine. Growing a true partnership with a supplier is another effort entirely. “Partnership” is actually shorthand for ‘shared successes and challenges, mutual education, correction, support, and innovation.’ It represents an ongoing journey, a mutual investment in a relationship focused on achieving the sponsor’s mission. The evidence of a thriving, productive partnership is its ongoing evolution: growing, innovating, flexing, and enabling.
Good suppliers don’t become good partners, and great partnerships don’t survive without keeping one question in the forefront:
How am I benefiting my partner?
Suppliers – are you diligently and regularly bringing all your offerings to bear for your sponsor? Sponsors – do you know the full breadth of services your sponsor offers now versus last year?
Both – how much are you willing to invest in each other?
Like all healthy relationships, partnerships take time. Time at the company level and time at the individual level, invested wisely and regularly, is vital for the partnership to deliver its maximum benefit. Knowing the benefits, what stands in the way of maximizing our supplier relationships?
Obstacles to Maximization
Practice Curiosity to Counter Routine
Oftentimes, suppliers and sponsors stay in the service relationship that defined their beginning. If we began in a staffing relationship, there we stay. If we built an FSP together, that’s where we operate. Are we truly maximizing our relationship? Familiarity, comfort, routine, process – they can all get in the way of creatively applying the partnership.
Sponsors – you know the supplier provides CRO services – do you know if they also provide Patient Recruitment? How about Quality or Validation, Consulting or FSP? You know and trust this supplier and they know and trust you. Why look at other suppliers for services that could be quite literally at your door? Possibly because we simply don’t know the options.
Staying current on the breadth of services and experiences your suppliers offer needn’t be time consuming. Consider inviting your supplier in for a formal ‘services overview / company update’ on an annual or semi-annual basis. They provide you KPIs on their present services – perhaps invite them to share a case study or two with each report. Specifically seek them out at conferences to see what they’re saying. Finally, be clear that you expect to be kept current and informed on their company as part of the relationship – it’s a two-way street.
Lean on the Team for Solutions
Real synergies often require innovation, and innovation requires creative, non-traditional thought. And thoughtfulness – that requires deliberate attention which is in short supply. The energy required to run a quality, competitive, and successful operation is tremendous and no more so than in the pharma / bioscience industry spaces. The mission combined with the market pull tremendous resources from truly invested leadership.
One effective way to overcome this obstacle is to lean on your key suppliers. Sponsors, share a bit of information, share your experiences with various processes, departments, fiscal cycles, etc. without feeling the need to define them, articulate them well, or have solutions. Make yourselves available for an ‘investigational’ conversation then go on with your work. Suppliers who are good partners have seen many challenges from many different perspectives and are able to absorb disparate threads of information and form ‘solution’ options for customer consideration. They will provide you strategies that may address your situation, or spur some ideas of your own that may not have been apparent previously.
A maximized partnership will feature many such interactions, which may or may not evolve into an SOW of some sort – that’s not the point. The point is to work together to achieve an outcome, knowing that good will come out of it for everyone.
Embrace a Winding Path
Driving real synergy, implementing truly impactful change, adding undeniable value to one’s company can involve walking a very circuitous path, with switchbacks, uphill climbs, and the occasional leap over water. Forging ahead when the end is obscured or perhaps completely unknown can seem unproductive. It can also be difficult to communicate progress, milestones, and impact to those outside the effort. Yet avoiding these journeys for yet another straight, tried and true path will ensure that we end up in exactly the same place we do every time: it’s reliable and without risk, but it is can also deliver very little reward.
Suppliers have the opportunity to develop these paths and share these journeys many times over, if they are partnership-minded. Let them own some of the navigation, provide material to communicate your vision and progress to your company. Consider their input on ‘lessons learned’ from other experiences and perhaps even open up some dialog between yourselves and another customer from whom you may glean knowledge. Don’t be afraid to explore.
Maximized = Mutual Success
Deploying a partner supplier to their fullest appropriate extent offers a wide range of benefits, not the least of which is shared success in a risk-moderated relationship. Shared successes don’t have to be limited to the services your trusted suppliers provide presently – the services you need may be right at your feet. Maximizing your supplier relationships minimizes time and maximizes success.