What to Look for in A Corporate Gifts Supplier

Corporate gifts, arguably one of the most iconic symbol in business culture around the world. The corporate gifts of your company represents your company value, company culture and who you are as a business. And to ensure the message and the image get across through the corporate gifts perfectly, selecting a corporate gift supplier is essentially the anchor to it all. The question is, what should you do to make sure you have the right corporate gift supplier? In a busy business city like Singapore, corporate gifts are everywhere and so are the suppliers, how will you select the right vendor to supply you with the corporate gift that represents your business accurately?

We hear you and we have a few tips for you. Let’s take a look at the top 3 factors that we think matter the most when it comes to selecting the right vendor to supply you with corporate gifts.

 

1. Creativity and passions over experience

 

You might think that you can do no wrong with going with an experienced corporate gifts provider. That is not entirely true. When it comes to corporate gifts, it is almost always better to have something unique, appropriate for the occasion or current social trends rather than something on the traditional side. And this is where creativity and the passions for corporate gifts come in.

A creative vendor will be able to help you find the most unique gifts, unique gifts make a much longer lasting impression, which strengthens your corporate image. The passion of the vendor will allow them to find the best quality products suitable for the corporate gifts, and remember, the quality of your corporate gifts is, inevitably, associated with the quality of your service and products.

Of course, if you could find an experienced, creative, and passionate corporate gift supplier, that would be the best case scenario. But if you just happen to have to choose, make sure you remember that creativity and passions will go much farther than experience.

 

Related (5 Tips for Maximizing Corporate Gift Giving)

 

2. Relationship skills matter more than you think

 

A good corporate gifts supplier is great at being likable and maintaining relationships. To be great at these things, one must first “care”, in fact, one must cares a lot and care just about everything. A vendor who cares about your experience with them will go extra mile for you in order to deliver the best customer experience possible, and a vendor who is willing to go the extra mile, by extend, will do a lot to make sure that you are happy with their services and product.

If you have a pleasant experience working with a vendor, the chance is, so does the vendor’s supplier and business partners. Naturally, people do not purposely give out an inferior product or service to the people they have a good relationship with, in fact, people often choose to provide better products and services to the people they enjoy working with or having a relationship with.

And when your corporate gifts supplier is receiving better products, services or even perks from its supplier, this means you are also getting higher quality products and services.

 

3. A highly organized operation and process.

 

Being organized means that there is a standardized process for every operation, this process is often, if not always, tested and improved to fit the operation. A well designed and tested process can minimize errors significantly, saving both parties time, energy and resources.

And by being organized, it would make things a lot easier if and when there is a mistake made somewhere during the process, making the whole operation highly efficient.

But it doesn’t just stop there, not only should a vendor be organized in the production process, the administration process should also be organized to minimize process time and improve efficiency.

Remember, it might be cool to work with a vendor that is heavily on the “artistic” side and doesn’t care much about the “other stuff”, but in real life, working with an unorganized business could be time consuming and might even create the lack of accountability when things go wrong.

 

Now that you know our top 3 factors in choosing a corporate gifts supplier, we would like to remind you that you should always do your own evaluation before committing to one or any supplier. And avoid relying on “words of mouth” entirely or too heavily. After all, “words of mouth” are often, if not always, accountability free and extremely subjective. Come up with your own process or create a list of criteria to rate all your options to get a clear picture if you’re having a hard time making a decision on vendors.