This Valentine's Day, fall in love with your L&D vendor

Across the world, many of us will celebrate Valentine’s Day on February 14th, loading up on roses, chocolates, fancy dinners, and candy hearts to honor our admiration of all things love and romance. And while historically, the focus of Valentine’s Day has been on romance, today it’s increasingly become more about friendship, and an opportunity to show gratitude to our nearest and dearest family and friends as well as our romantic love interest. 

Love does indeed make the world go round. Humanity itself is strengthened by positive and wholesome relationships and this is arguably what makes the world a better place. But what about in the workplace? What can we learn from this focus on warm and supportive relationships here? Can we use some of this positive and fun energy to enhance our workplace relationships (without crossing any inappropriate lines, of course!)? 

In this blog, we will focus on the importance of the vendor relationship in the corporate learning space - that essential external learning partner who helps your organization solve tricky performance problems and get better results. Do you love your vendor? You may not trade Valentine love notes with each other or even boxes of chocolate, but we do hope you’re both committed to building a long-term relationship that’s more than just empty flirtation. Let’s dive in... 

Why partner with a vendor in the first place? 

For many corporate learning teams, taking on the entirety of the design and development of learning solutions tailored to the organization is beyond their capabilities or capacity. Perhaps the team doesn’t have the full suite of skills to design and develop a really robust and global onboarding program. Maybe the organization wants something high-end or more complex than they have the skills to build in-house. Maybe they’re looking for new and innovative approaches and want to try something new – spice things up a bit to create more impact. Or perhaps it’s a capacity issue – the team just doesn’t have enough people hours available to get all the work done that needs to get done. 

Enter the vendor relationship. As a digital learning professional, I’ve been on the vendor side of the corporate learning relationship for most of my career. I’ve worked at small boutique shops, freelanced as a consultant and have had the good fortune to be with a larger agency-type organisation (Kineo) for more than a decade. I’ve seen a lot of these corporate learning/vendor relationships come and go. Some more loving than others. 

Switching out vendors – fear of commitment, or what? 

We had a Financial Services client a number of years back who told us that every three years or so they liked to mix things up with vendors, and go find new learning development partners to work with. Why? Because they wanted fresh ideas and they didn’t want to keep seeing the same old things from the same old vendors. As a result, they had worked with a lot of vendors and spent a lot of time in the ‘getting to know you’ phase with all of them. Then, they’d move on. A bit like speed dating, perhaps.

Other organizations will go out to an RFP (Request for Proposal) to get new vendors on their list of preferred partners every few years - often these processes are run through procurement with price being the most heavily weighted metric on the scorecard. 

Some of the mindsets we’ve come across when organizations think they need to keep switching vendors: 

• Pricing won’t be competitive. Unless we go out to bid for every project, we’re not going to get the best price. We need to make every vendor prove themselves on each and every project.
• The vendor will take our business for granted. If we work with them year after year, they’ll get complacent and just deliver what we asked for but nothing more.
• Their ideas will get stale. The vendor won’t bring anything new to the table. They’ll keep using the same technology and putting forth the same types of solutions. 
• This vendor is only good at X. We need a vendor who can do Y or Z. 

This just doesn’t seem like a satisfying way to build long-lasting relationships, does it? 

A truly collaborative partnership 

Now, since I am on the vendor side of this relationship, I’ll admit my perspective may be a little biased. But I think it should be really obvious why treating a vendor as a commodity or a transactional relationship may not be the best approach for your corporate learning team. We’ve found our best partnerships are with the organizations that we continue to work with year in and year out. We’ve gotten to know each other really well and we push each other to improve our processes and standards. It’s like we’ve moved past the dating stage and are in it for the long-term value of the relationship.

So what are the advantages of developing a long term relationship with your learning development vendor? 

• They really get to know your culture and your people (there’s genuine compassion)
• They really get to know your technology ecosystems
• They really get to know your brand and corporate voice
• They can then be documenting those standards and guidelines and creating reusable templates and checklists that ensure you’re getting a quality product every time
• They understand your data – and use that to improve and iterate
• They get to understand your overall learning strategy and how that supports your business and organizational objectives, so they can ensure the solutions they’re providing are doing what you need them to do
• You push each other to innovate, be it process or technology or approaches. Understanding together what works and doesn’t work for your culture so that together you can refine the solutions and approaches
• All of that knowledge and understanding then leads to time and budgets savings on subsequent projects because this understanding exists and is well documented

An evolving and developing relationship 

These factors and challenges take time and iteration to get right. In fact, it’s a constant evolution – kind of like marriage. But if you treat each project as a new horizon and start over again with a new partner each time, you run a real risk of getting the fundamentals wrong.  

You may get close on that first project. However, it takes a true collaborative partnership built on mutual trust and shared understanding of your organization's unique needs to build this kind of solid framework. It takes people who have that shared understanding and the right eye for detail to bring the right lens to each and every project – and to the overall relationship. 

Scaling up for success 

Getting this to happen at scale – to bring consistency across all of the work you do, you need a vendor who is more than just a development house who will execute an order, but rather a strategic partner who brings new insights to the table. The vendor should be open to sharing their experience with other industries and companies to help you see outside of the walls of your own organization. 

That will help with designing the optimal solutions – be it a live course, a series of interactive elearning modules, job aids and performance support or a fully blended solution. 

In conclusion: Listen, learn and look forward 

Once you find a great vendor, build on that relationship together. As with any strong and meaningful relationship, there may be challenges and bumps along the way, but you and your partner should have the maturity and the skills to problem solve together to ensure the relationship thrives for everyone involved. 

That sounds like a match made in heaven – a relationship worthy of – if not a box of chocolates and a bottle of champagne – at least a strong understanding of each other and a level of trust where both parties know you can work through any issues or challenges together.

At Kineo we pride ourselves on building long term relationships with our clients. We get embedded in your organization and become an extension of your team. 

Get in touch to find out what consistent ingredients we bring to the table to get you quantifiable results.