Many major companies now prefer to put out tenders for a single supplier for their promotional merchandise rather than use a number of different business gift suppliers. The reasons for doing this are many and a well run tender for the supply of promotional items can save a company a great deal of expense over the course of a year.
Controlling the supply of promotional items is a good reason for using the tender process because once it is in place you determine who buys what products from whom at at how much. It also means that you can agree terms in relation to service level agreements rebates etc.
A company that allows all of its staff to buy everything from promotional bottled water to leather conference folders from any business gift supplier they feel like dealing with is losing a lot of money. The reason is that untrained an unskilled buyers tend to keep going back to an original supplier and never look at alternative cheaper sources of supply. Or as often happens because that supplier makes an effort to send them a few free gifts throughout the year. These free promotional gifts are often sponsored by the manufacturers and given to the distributors free so there is nothing illegal in people accepting them as long as it is not against company policy.
If we take another example in the promotional clothing arena items such as printed T-shirts or embroidered polo shirts can cost a company dear if not purchased properly by the 20 or so people buying them. The problem is that every single one of them are probably paying repeat origination charges every time. An origination charge for embroidery could be as much as £50 and for silk screen printing £30 per colour. This means that every time each of them put in an order for their company branded promotional clothing, on a 4 colour logo they are paying around £170, if you multiply that by twenty buyers that gives you £3,400 so if they buy say three times a year a large corporation could be spending over £10,000 on origination costs that would come free of charge form one supplier.
Promotional merchandise tenders offer the opportunity for proper service level agreements to be set up. These are usually standard conditions with any supplier who trades in a professional way. However with a single source supplier a company is able to be much more demanding and insist upon these service levels being much tighter. Financial rebates will also usually form part of the service level agreements with money being returned based upon annual expenditure.
If you do decide to go ahead with a tender you should contact a few promotional merchandise suppliers first and ask them for details of well run tenders they have already completed. It will also save the suppliers a lot of time and money as they will not be spending hours answering totally irrelevant questions designed for a tender for other non related goods or services. Experience in running full promotional merchandise programmes is essential so make sure you choose a company that can demonstrate lots of expertise in that area.
------
Paul Beirne has been the Sales Director at
BTC Group for more than 20 years. His experience has helped to make the company the largest privately owned Promotional Merchandise manufacturer in the UK. To watch a short video about what this amazing company does please visit the About Us section in the home page
Author RSS Views:
Print this article
Ask about this article