Purchasing services is much like building a collection of your favorite music CDs from scratch. You should take a broad look at the musical offerings from every genre that suits your interests and denote the discs you think are most promising.
Maybe you note bands because you’ve heard them play, or because they are from a regional hotbed of music, or because they are known as a musical pioneer in their field.
Next, you can take a sampling of all the music readily available from those artists by listening to sound clips. As you listen, you can jot down all the names, songs, and albums that you like and remove any of the selections from contention that you don’t like.
After final review and contemplation, you can purchase your final selections, and then the next thing you know, you have new music to enjoy based on a simple and sound vetting process, which might give you ideas for yet another set of music purchases.
When you buy services for your company, you should essentially go through that same process. You scan the names and basic information of potential service providers who might meet your needs based on references, reputation, or research; you then select the ones that look most promising based on your prearranged criteria. From there, conduct as much due diligence on each selection as possible, including apples-to-apples price comparisons.
Ultimately, you should do a thorough job of reviewing all pertinent options and then make rational, proactive, expeditious purchasing decisions.
Once you have easy access to information and notes from many personal and press sources, you need to cleanse and think about the data you have on hand. At that point, you can make decisions and take bids from vendors who can fill in pieces of your business plan.
If you have three options as mentioned, you will find that you are buffered because if one doesn’t work out for any reason, which is often the case, there are two others from which you can choose. With three options in your pocket, you can market your own services more aggressively knowing you have support, and use this leverage to gently pressure the service providers to provide what you need, when you need it, at a fair price.
