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Invite Your PCB Partner to a Strategic Sales Meeting

The best way to work with your PCB vendors is to treat them as strategic partners. This means not only sharing your current needs but your future ones as well. I know that this requires a great deal of trust on your part as well as that of your PCB vendor partner. But if you have been reading this column, and doing everything we have recommended, then you should already be prepared for this. If you want your PCB vendor to be prepared to meet your future needs, you have to tell them what they are; it's that simple.

The next step is to invite your PCB vendor partner to your annual strategic sales meeting. I know this can be a scary thought. But you have a signed NDA, and you trust your partner company, so now is the perfect time not only to test that trust but use it to your full advantage by bringing your PCB vendor partner into your strategic planning session. Here are six steps to do exactly that.

1. Share your plans for the future. Where is your company going? What new products are you going to be building? What will your PCB and technology needs be? Are you going to need an increase in technology and tighter parameters? Are you going to need new types of PCBs, such as moving into a product that will require flex technology? Will you be entering a new marketplace that will require your PCB vendor to get a special military specification or AS 9100 that you will need to prepare for?
2. Ask them to share as well. This is a great time for you and the rest of the team to find out about your vendor partner and their company. What are their growth plans? What is their technology roadmap like, and does it align with your needs? This is a good time to make sure that your vendor is going to be able to keep up with your needs. Also, find out if they are willing to invest in time and capital so that their company's future capabilities are going to match your own not only in the next year but in the next five years as well.
3. Share your issues, challenges, and concerns. Let one another in on the difficult challenges that each of you faces in your markets and how you can help one another to successfully meet those challenges.
4. Have a solid engineering-to-engineering breakout session so that both companies can discuss the future technology needs of tomorrow's products and get help and advice from your expert PCB consultant. Who better to help your engineers design their next PCBs than the people who will fabricate them?
5. Review the past year and discuss issues that occurred during that time. This is a great time to have a performance review with your PCB vendor partner. Have their quality and delivery performance report card ready, and spend some time discussing it. Then, have an open and honest discussion on how they can improve in the coming year.
6. Discuss the actual partnership. This is a good time to discuss if the partnership is working for the two of you. Talk about whether your PCB vendor feels that the relationship is fair to them as well as you. Remember that most customer-vendor partnerships can devolve into an unfair, unbalanced partnership, which is what you have been trying to avoid at all costs (e.g., "whoever has the gold makes the rules"); make sure this is not happening. And if your vendor partner tells you that it is, then work together to stop that downhill slide and get back on track. A true partnership is fair and equitable for both parties, and one that isn't equitable will dissolve in no time; you have worked too hard and come too far for that to happen.

Remember that a true partnership is one where two parties agree to work together to do something that neither of them could do alone. If you stick to that definition, you will never have PCB acquisition problems again.

Anaya Vardya is president and CEO of American Standard Circuits. Vardya is also co-author of The Printed Circuit Designer's Guide to... Fundamentals of RF/Microwave PCBs and Flex and Rigid-Flex Fundamentals. Visit I-007eBooks.com to download these and other free, educational titles.