The Adventures of Captain Client and Vendorman

As you can tell by the title I am going to take the approach of citing observations and readings about the landscape of the Client Vendor relationship dynamic and how it should function like a good superhero combo not Hero vs. Arch Enemy.

Over the years I have been on both sides of the equation of this relationship and seen some pretty jaw dropping and eye popping relationship building interactions. These situations usually end the same way, Clients dislike the Vendor and the Vendor thinks the Client doesn't get it.

The general dynamics of the current behavior of most business to business relationships fall on this interaction paradigm, The Client wants everything for Free and The Vendor wants to charge top dollar for every product and service. Inherently this relationship is doomed to fail. There has to be a better way right, there is!

I think social media and the emergence of the social business design will start to help this B2B relationship to start functioning like the great super hero combos of history. Clients and Vendors can really collaborate and develop strong partnerships in the public view, then together start helping consumers by their great superhero collaborations!

Now with social media\technologies\business design there is so much to gain from being transparent and honest in public, that the behind the scenes collaboration will be so much better. Then the consumers start trusting two companies they might not had even thought were partnering on things!

Now this does come with several layers of complexity, huge behavioral shifts, and open constructive communication, but I think there are huge opportunities for the B2B landscape to produce some really cool and innovative products and services. Businesses will have the ability to expand and contract based on higher level of need around design, innovation, and consumer advocacy. These partnernative relationships can really help each side focus on their core business and have the confidence that their counterparts are in the game with them.

One area I see more and more examples of these great Client Vendor partnerships being executed well are in the SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS spaces. I think one of the main reasons is operating in the Cloud is a completely different way of collaborating than build, install, or staff augmentation when dealing with a Vendor that provides these products and services.

So if Target is Robin who is our Batman, if we are Superman who is our Spiderman (they teamed up a couple of times) If we are Captain America who is our Green Lantern……

Let me know what you think will make these relationships get better. What can we do on the Client side to shift our thinking?, what types of Vendor behaviors should we be looking for?