Purchase Skill | How to effectively communicate with Chinese suppliers?

Buyers must continue to communicate with sales (suppliers) when purchasing: inquiry, expedite, and deal with various after-sales issues. Faced with all this, many buyers find it difficult to communicate with sales. However, the daily communication between purchasing and sales is a very important link that cannot be omitted.

After reading this article, you may gain something.

Inquiry communication

Inquiry is the most common job for buyers. Buyers and sales will spend more time and energy in inquiry and quotation. Buyers often want sales to list the unit price, delivery period, and tax rate according to the list they give to the salesperson. A concise response is very good. This is simple and efficient.

But in fact, in many inquiry processes, sales will ask many questions about purchasing: Are you using it yourself? Is the delivery time in a hurry? Where is it used…

Many purchasers feel puzzled why there are so many irrelevant questions. In fact, this is because the salesman wants to find out the details of the purchase, according to the customer’s urgency, acceptance, price sensitivity and other aspects of the product, so as to customize a perfect quotation plan.

Then the supplier will pre-imagine the buyer’s possible response when a problem occurs and its own countermeasures. Therefore, during the inquiry process, the buyers need to consider what you can say and how to say.

After the price is quoted, it is often the sales person who asks the buyer: when are you buying? Do you want anything you quoted last time? At this time, the buyer can also respond according to the salesperson’s quotation. The key is how you express and express what to the other party has become a very important piece of information feedback. A word that the you says at will, without reservation, may affect the final price.

Communication during order execution

Many buyers think that after sending the purchase contract to the supplier, they can wait for the product to be shipped on time. In fact, this is not always the case. Even if the suppliers also want to deliver on time and promote long-term stable and friendly cooperation.

However, the supplier’s factory scheduling, customer priority, raw material issues, and production equipment issues will all affect the final delivery time. Many sellers do not tell the buyer in the early stage of the problem. They are often forced to tell the buyer that the goods will not be delivered on time when the delivery date is approaching and the problem cannot be covered up.

At the same time, it is regrettable that many times the sales will make up a variety of reasons to let the buyer understand that everything seems to have nothing to do with the supplier’s factory. It may be a problem in a certain link such as raw material manufacturers, customs, logistics and transportation…, as a buyer, do you know how to recognize the problem?

So the communication between buyers and sales goes far beyond inquiry and quotation. During the execution of the order, the understanding and communication of the schedule of various time nodes and materials are also important tasks that cannot be ignored by buyers.

In order to maintain necessary communication with suppliers, it is also important to require suppliers to provide the most true and accurate information. And this information can be used as an important criterion for evaluating suppliers.

Those suppliers who often fail to deliver goods on time, fail to provide accurate information during communication, and repeatedly delay delivery, which put the purchaser into a very passive position can be considered for being eliminated.

Communication after problems

Various problems of delivery in international trade often arise. What is even more frightening is that the supplier does not communicate with the buyer in time to find an emergency plan or formulate a new delivery plan after discussion, but conceal these problems from the buyer.

I remember reading an article: In order to consider the interests of customers, a supplier production and delivery goods without communicating with customers. In fact, this product is not what the customer really wants.

So for suppliers, sometimes what they think is not necessarily what buyers think. The importance of communication is evident. In many cases, suppliers who do not communicate with the buyer in time to cover up the problem and find ways to deal with it on their own are often more useless and farfetched than communicating with the buyer in a timely and frank manner and actively discussing emergency plans. It also makes the problems that had time to make up become tricky, resulting in a very passive position for the purchaser.

Conclusion

As a buyer, you must always maintain communication with the supplier, especially after placing an order. How to adopt corresponding strategies and skills to communicate and negotiate with each other? It is not that you will tell everything the supplier asks, but you will answer with thought. Instructing suppliers to maintain effective and necessary communication with themselves is also essential, and it can also be regarded as a part of supplier management.

Communication can shorten the distance between people. Good prices and good services need to be obtained through communication.