How you do business with vendors and customers in not an accident.Be intentional about every aspect of your business from Day 1. Business process outsourcing takes the mystery out of it. Either you say how it goes or they say how it goes. Which one do you want it to be? Your business website should have a "Doing Business With Us" (DBWU) page spelling out expectations, payments, emails and addresses. 

Other Blogs 

Several inviziblogs cover the fundamentals of business which support "doing business with us" successfully. Here are 3 greats blogs to study:

• 3 Mind Blowing Myths of the Paperless Office
• 5 Stealthy Tricks on Getting Paid Lightning Fast
• 9 Insider Tricks on How to Start a Company

Anything Everything

T Harv Ecker predicts your business success like this, "how you do anything is how you do everything." Read this one a few times to get the power of it. If your customer service is half-assed then your billing and your employee's attitudes are likely half assed as well. Some things might be great but overall your business ain't great. The tendency is to do everything consistently regardless of whether its bad or good. A great business comes from being intentional and a bad business comes from being unintentional. 

Over and Over

Have you counted the number of replies in an average email thread? Most of the time two or more are a waste of time because somebody is repeating the same thing over and over again. For example, a vendor asks how to submit a bill or how long it will take to get paid and 13 emails later they have the answer. What if you had to do this with every customer and what if you could eliminate it? It should take one email that says, please click on the following link for doing business with us. The link can be a hidden or visible page on your website based on how you want to reveal the information. What gets repeated over and over again in your business?

Doing Business With Us 

There are 3 main reasons for creating a Doing Business With Us page:

1) Helps you define your own processes (what a great benefit)

2) Communicate your processes to vendors and customers (you say how it goes)

3) Avoid wasting resources (you will waste a lot of them if you don't say how it goes)

Here is an example DBWU page.

The 5 Components of DBWU

1) Doing Business With Us Creed (key requirements and processes; explain you are a paperless company) 

Example of a “Doing Business With Us” Creed for a real estate business:

1.     Have a working email address.
2.     Have an email that you check frequently.
3.     Prefer to use email as main form of communication.
4.     Have a smart phone with email setup.
5.     Use text messaging on your smart phone.
6.     Be able to take pictures on your smart phone and email them.
7.     Must be licensed and insured.
8.     Understand that we don’t send or receive ANY paper documents.
9.     Agree to send invoices to our [email protected] email for prompt payment.
10.     Accept our invitation to get paid electronically.
11.     Agree to our terms and conditions.
12.     Read our FAQ’s to fully understand our process.

2) FAQ's (this is self explanatory and both DBWU and FAQ's should link to each other)

3) Partner with Us (explain how NEW customers, vendors and stakeholders can start doing business)

4) Required documents (these are required for new and existing stakeholders for legal and compliance reasons) 

Examples: W-9, contractor agreement, certificates of insurance, licenses

5) Resources and forms (provide examples of required documents and other resources)

Intentional Redundancy

FAQ's are a great way to reinforce a process through redundancy. For example, notice how FAQ's like When do we get paid?, How do we submit invoices? and What do we need to include on our invoices are repeating the things already spelled out in the "Doing Business With Us Creed." Some people get information faster in FAQ style formats rather than a list so redundancy is your friend in this case. Repeat as much as possible because the website is doing the talking and not you. Spelling out your process doesn't mean stakeholders will follow it but they won't waste as much of your company resources. 

Training & Context

Likewise having a DBWU page doesn't mean employees will magically send vendors and customers there or be motivated to save their own wasted time. Habits are powerful things and employees who are used to 13 emails per vendor may continue emailing away unless you say how it goes. A DBYU page isn't complete without a training session to explain the reason for having it. The typical overworked and underpaid employee should be jazzed to know you intentionally eliminated some of their wheel spinning so they get home for more dinners. If you keep repeating this to your employees, then they will keep repeating it to customer and vendors. 

Interface

There are so many Invisible Expenses™ hidden within the typical interactions between customers, vendors and other stakeholders this blog would go on forever if we dug a little deeper. We mentioned a few blogs above that address the issues happening under the hood. The Doing Business With Us approach is really the interface between your paperless business processes and the people that need to use them outside of your business. When you get The Ultimate Paperless Back Office™ virtual bookkeeping services by invizibiz you get an overnight solution, so add the DBWU page to your website to get the maximum benefit. Invizibiz gives you the magic of business process outsourcing to make the DBWU page possible otherwise you’ll likely be describing your own poor processes.