TOP TEN TIPS
- It’s always better, and much easier than going the RFP route, to work things out where you are, if you possibly can. Aside from all the extra work involved, there’s always a risk you’ll find yourself jumping from the frying pan into the fire in today’s fast-changing environment.
- Before you open discussions, write down exactly what you expect of your transfer agent and exactly where they’re falling short.
- Rank your expectations in terms of their importance to you, your staff, and your top management.
- Arrange a face-to-face meeting with your account manager, and his or her manager, to make sure there’s mutual and crystal-clear understanding of your expectations and of their commitments to meeting them.
- Tell them you want to take a tour of their shop as if you were a prospective client.
- Make sure that all your expectations, and all the commitment the agent makes are promptly summarized in writing, exactly as you’ve agreed.
- Ask yourself if your account manager – and his or her manager – and the people you observed on the tour – appear to have all the skills and all the necessary resources to delivery on their commitments. Sometimes the account manager is the real problem (too little training or experience, too little influence to get things done, or just "bad chemistry"). In such cases a change in managers is good for both sides and will quickly right the relationship.
- Assuming you’ve been convinced that the agent has (a) gotten the message and (b) does indeed have the firepower, the willingness and the eagerness to meet your expectations, you probably won’t need to set any formal deadlines for full compliance. If, on the other hand, you’re not fully won over, or if you find yourself ready to issue an ultimatum, it’s probably time to start looking elsewhere.
- Before you issue one of those silly boilerplate RFPs, make sure that you’re clear, and that recipients will be crystal-clear, on what the most important deciding factors are.
- Don’t be fooled or stampeded by those "benchmarking surveys" or by the highly specious claims that some agents use them to make about being "number one" or "the best" at something or other, and don’t waste your time trying to decode them. What you really need to do is to benchmark the feedback you get about the things that are most important to you – not just in the RFP response and on your tour, but by speaking with companies that are most like your own, in terms of size, complexity, product usage and expectations.
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