Property Management Companies, Please Stop Asking Your Vendors for Money
Are you guilty of this?
Image by Ignal Ness via Unsplash
I think we need to talk about requests to “sponsor” property management company events. If you truly believe your vendors are “partners,” please stop asking them to sponsor your events. It’s inappropriate and taking advantage of a situation where you have more power. Let me explain.
When a PM company and supplier enter into a relationship, there is bound to be some sort of discussion about price. So after some back and forth, we come to an agreement that both parties are happy about. We shake hands and off to a great relationship.
But then, suddenly we get a request to “sponsor” an event! A sponsorship is supposed to be a situation where my company pays for exposure to a new audience in the hope of getting new business. But this scenario is just to give money back to an existing customer, which means all we are doing is giving an additional discount. And this discount isn’t freely negotiated at the beginning—it’s a strong-arm tactic that implies that if we don’t pay up, then we will lose that client. That’s not true with all clients, of course, but even the perception of that is detrimental to the idea that we are “partners.”
