The commonsku community has a buying power of over $1B in annual sales from today's fastest growing Distributors. As a Supplier on the platform, you have the potential to tap into the success of our Distributors and make their wins your own. Through constant engagement and an ongoing presence on the system, you will have the opportunity to create new partnerships with Distributors previously unaware of your capabilities and talents and will help contribute to the next billion dollar milestone!

Where to Start

You've been invited to use commonsku by your Admins and you're ready to jump right in and land new leads. Great! But, before you start to utilize the social and interactive tools in your account, you should ensure your own profile and company is set up for success. Learn more about The Importance of a good profile to ensure your personal and company pages in commonsku are up to date, secondly get a basic understanding of the The 3 Pillars of your Home (page) before continuing reading here. Don't worry, this article isn't going anywhere; you have time!

Communicating on the Community

The community tab is well named as it brings together the community of users that are on commonsku, whether they be a Distributor or a Supplier. A central hub of interactions and engaging content, the activity posted is open to any and all users to comment on, meaning you can more easily create new relationships with Distributors! So, how can you make the most of this open and interactive feed?

Suggesting your products

Sounds simple enough, right? But lets outline some pitfalls so your posts are more valued amongst the community.

Pitfall 1: Typing your item SKU / Name / or posting links to external sites.

Reason: This method requires the Distributor to source your items more manually. The more work it is for the user, the less likely they are to use your suggestions.

Pitfall 2: Taking the interaction out of the community.

Distributor: I'm looking for these ideas.

Supplier: I'll send you an email.

Reason: Your suggestions are now not only dripping in mystery for the rest of the community, but whatever it is you send as an email will require that Distributor to find and upload into their commonsku project. 

Solution?

Suggesting your products within commonsku puts your product ideas within one click away from being used by anyone that is browsing the community feed. To Suggest your products:

- On a community post click "Suggest Products"

- Find your suggested products either through Distributor Central or add them in manually

- Click on any item image to add as a suggestion

- Click "Comment"

Looking at your suggestions through the lens of a Distributor profile, you'll see how quick and easy it is for them to select your ideas and pull them directly into their own Projects. This will encourage further growth with the Distributor with which you are replying to, but most importantly your suggested products are available to the entire community to use as well!

Leveraging your Insights Data

Now that you're more familiar with suggesting your products to the community, you need to track how successful those suggestions are; how often your products are being suggested is a good correlation to the POs that are then created and submitted to your team. They key to finding all of this information can be found through your Insights feed.

How can it be leveraged?

Think as though the Distributor is reaching out to you requesting more information for the products they are adding to their projects. Had it been any other form of communication (phone call, email, in person meeting) they may have asked for your own knowledge on those products e.g. Pricing, virtuals, production times, alternative options etc.

With that in mind you should treat the Insights feed no different from those other communications. Be PROACTIVE and leave comments on what you can do to help push that product from ideation to production.

BEST PRACTICE: Add VALUE by commenting with your expertise on the product. Move away from solely 'liking' the posts as it does nothing for that Distributor to pass on to their client. Any and all comments you leave on Insights posts are private between you and the Distributor. Unlike the community feed it will not be open for others outside of your network to see.

How best to Collaborate

You have been invited to give your input and suggestions for this open Project with the Distributor. You may not know the Distributor in which the request is coming from, but that doesn't matter! You have still been invited to give your insight. How best to utilize this feature is by showing off your impeccable product knowledge and customer service skills by suggesting your products, as well as giving input based on the Project's Event Type and the Distributor's client Industry

In the same fashion you would use the community feed, this is your chance to suggest your products directly to the Distributor.

Understanding the Collaborate Request

The Distributor has indicated through use of this feature that they are looking for outside help from Suppliers on commonsku. This can either be that they have reached out to you individually, or they have selected to Collaborate with ALL Suppliers. In either case this is your opportunity to put your selected products forward in the hope they are selected for this Distributor's Project.

How you can work this

Suggesting products is just one of the ways in which you can make the most of this request. What's important to remember is you're not limited to collaborating based on the request description. Instead, this is an opportunity for you to go above and beyond and potentially build a future partnership with the Distributor. How? Two requirements for the Distributor to create their project, and thus the use the Collaborate feature, is to include the Event Type and Industry. Take your time giving insight into how many other projects you have successfully worked on within those same parameters; give suggestions of products that you have used previously within an Industry, even share images of previous events where your products were a huge success.

Ultimately you are broadening the Distributor's horizon of ideas. Expanding their scope of product suggestions they may have not previously thought to include.