The ThomasNet Audience Development and Outreach Team continues to press on in 2014, in fact, we have doubled our efforts and staff to accommodate the many premise visit invites and speaking engagements coming our way. A common source of frustration throughout the B2B purchasing community is the lack of trusted sources to help them find suppliers. Procurement staffs are tasked with vetting the best suppliers to fulfill the demands of Engineering, Management, Production, etc. Their careers hinge on the ability to source qualified suppliers for long term relationships. They can’t afford to make mistakes. Just as important is the fact that new vendors are critical to production schedules so there’s little time to waste in sourcing suppliers.
You may think there are expensive, guarded portals they turn to when they need to find new suppliers, but the truth is none exist. Managing large amounts third party data specific to industrial suppliers is a huge undertaking that most businesses can’t handle. Actually, there is no one other than ThomasNet who continues to provide this service! The ‘old fashioned way’ of getting the breadth of qualified, factual information from ThomasNet is not what you think. There is no library to turn to and general search engine results yield consumer-based suppliers and information that is ancillary to sourcing suppliers. The lack of efficiencies tied to ‘surfing the Web’.
ThomasNet remains the #1 leading resource for efficiently vetting qualified suppliers to the procurement professionals around the world. While our audience development efforts are designed to increase our audience, what we’re finding is our invitations to present our services can have a hidden agenda for these procurement professionals to tell us what information to surface to make their jobs even more efficient!
