How To Get Started With Supplier Onboarding For On-Demand Platforms
Efficient supplier onboarding is a critical success factor when your company relies on channel partners such as resellers, consultants, or systems integrators. Whether answering questions, up-selling your products, or fielding customer service concerns, these suppliers are often the primary point of contact with the customer. Essentially, suppliers are ambassadors of the brand.
Here is how to create an effective supplier onboarding program.
1. Attract The Right Suppliers
Because your customers are interacting with your vendors, attracting the right people is a critical “step zero” of the supplier onboarding process. You want suppliers who can come in and deliver value immediately within the platform’s brand experience rather than requiring a lot of additional support to get up to speed or to align their offerings with your values.
This means a good onboarding funnel reaches back past the moment when a supplier signs up with your platform. It should be part of your recruiting process.
To weave onboarding into your recruitment process, use education and free training to spread the word about your platform. That helps suppliers come to your platform with a strong sense of what sets you apart and how they can be most successful. This will also get channel partners naturally started on the path to being ambassadors for your brand.
2. Gather Critical Information Seamlessly
Once a supplier signs on to your platform, you have a lot of information to collect — addresses and phone numbers, tax forms, bank account information for processing payments, and more. You need a streamlined way to gather all this important documentation.
The old way of gathering information was by emailing —or even mailing— forms back and forth. These days, secure online portals allow you to only sensitive information over the web and import it directly into your supplier management program. This speeds up the process and helps to eliminate human error and is more scalable than entering data by hand.
Some tech start-ups support infrastructure for gathering supplier information, including Stripe [1] for payment processing and DocuSign [2] for collecting critical documents.
3. Train Suppliers On Your Platform
Your new channel partners will have varying degrees of familiarity with your product and the industry you work in. Your goal is to get each of them conversant with your platform or service as quickly as possible so they can move swiftly toward their first successful transaction.
But simply making training available is no guarantee of effectiveness; how you actually deliver the training is critical. Massive training manuals, lengthy PDF files, and two-hour webinars don’t cut it these days. Instead, use immersive techniques like bite-sized online courses and embedded training to guide first-time users through the process.
4. Lead Them To Their First Quick Win
In the first few days, suppliers are often just testing the waters. If they don’t see early results, they may move on to your competitors. How do you reduce that critical time between signing up for the platform and earning the first revenue?
Well, that embedded, open training is a critical competitive advantage.
But remember alternative methods. You can deliver success training articles via your blog, newsletter, or a private vendor library. You can also create mini courses around a topic like marketing or customer service and incentivize vendors to take them by setting up a badge to put on their vendor profile.
While you’re training suppliers on the details of your platform, remember to address non-technical issues that also contribute to their success like what makes a compelling profile photo, how to effectively market their business or how to write great product descriptions and a bio.
5. Set Them Up To Succeed
Supplier onboarding doesn’t just stop when you’ve gathered suppliers’ information and sent them through the training program. A good program will lead suppliers through a series of milestones: their first successful transaction, their first review, their first service expansion and more.
You can offer ongoing support through a robust library of training courses that they can access on demand. You should also set up email autoresponders designed to lead your service provider deeper into the capabilities of your platform.
Along with providing good training resources, showcase success stories to get your new suppliers excited about what working with your platform can do for them. Seek out and share proof points and tips from your early adopters, and leverage those testimonials to help new suppliers become even more invested in becoming successful.
Meeting The Technical Challenges Of Supplier Onboarding
It’s a tough order to do all of this without proper tools, especially when you’re dealing with a large number of suppliers and an onboarding process that goes in waves you can’t anticipate.
On-demand companies need onboarding solutions that are efficient and scalable. Fortunately, an innovative crop of service providers is being launched to meet the needs of on-demand companies, from payments and human resources support, to supplier training.
If you want to start onboarding your suppliers with one of the most modern LMSs on the market, give SchoolKeep a try (free for 14-days).
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