Not all apps are created equal

Choose Wisely...

 “If I already know someone, why would I use a platform to communicate with them?”

We hear this from time to time – Dealboard members browsing the thousands of metric tons available any given day on Dealboard, and finding seafood offered by someone they know. Their temptation is to use their usual ways of communicating with that party – email or WhatsApp.

Why not?

Here’s why not:

Email isn’t safe

Email is a great way to communicate, but it takes a lot of work to make it really secure for sensitive communications such as negotiating large transactions.

And, even with the best security measures in place, things slip by – have you heard about this recent and high profile example of phishing in the seafood industry? https://www.farodevigo.es/economia/2023/02/28/estafar-ceo-nueva-pescanova-anunciandole-83867748.html

The CEO in the article is clearly taking it in stride, and even having a bit of a laugh about the situation. But this is only funny until someone falls for it, and it’s only funny until it happens to you.

What sizable seafood company hasn't been spoofed in the past year by an email communication that isn’t really coming from who it is supposedly from? Things worse than this happen all the time.

Tightening your email security drives up your IT costs significantly, and doesn’t mean something won’t happen to you. And if you fall for it, the economic damage to your company could be irreparable.

WhatsApp isn’t much better

WhatsApp is great for instant communication, but you can never be sure if the person you’re working with is still a representative of the company you want to deal with.

People change jobs, and when they do they often take their WhatsApp numbers with them. Suppose they move over to a competitor of yours… are you really ready to share your prices, inventory and other key information with your competition?

Then what?

Even if your email or WhatsApp conversations are not compromised, and you successfully negotiate a transaction, what follows are a lot of manual steps you need to do to communicate the deal terms to the rest of your team to follow up with shipping and payment. That means you are re-typing a lot of information rather than hunting your next deal, or you and your teams are stuck chasing down misunderstandings with the other party.

What's needed is a safe room, a zone where seafood parties can get their work done quickly, efficiently, and with reduced risk... so that they can move on to the next deal and expand their business.

That's why not. 

How to give yourself the gift of time

“I don’t have time.”

How often do you seek someone’s attention only to hear that phrase? How often do you use that phrase with others?

In the seafood industry, where staff layers have been cut back and where margins are razor-thin, it’s customary to be extremely busy. Some may even feel a sense of importance because they don’t have room in their schedules.

But are you keeping busy with the right things?

Recall the Eisenhower Matrix, which organizes work based on urgency and importance:

	Urgent	Not Urgent
Not Important	Are you too busy here…
Important		…to have time for what’s here?

Wouldn’t it be nice to receive the gift of time? To free up your schedule to focus on more important things, and things you don’t get around to enough in your daily activities?

Negotiating seafood transactions is pretty important, and urgent, so this usually receives a lot of attention, rightly so.

But after the transaction is negotiated, what happens next? Hiding right behind the negotiation lies a host of necessary tasks which eat up valuable time. Think about all the different teams both inside and outside your company who need to be informed of the details of the transaction – logistics services, inspection services, operations, accounting, and more.

Dealboard believes you can gain back valuable time by rethinking how you connect the place where you negotiate transactions with the rest of your business. Any time you re-type something into another system or pick up the phone to recite information to someone else, you’re consuming your own time on tasks which, though urgent, aren’t the most important. To make matters worse, if you are anything less than absolutely perfect every time you do this, you might make a simple mistake and introduce an error which costs you and others even more valuable time to correct.

Give yourself and your team the gift of time by improving and automating your operations. Negotiate transactions using a platform which can automatically and flawlessly transmit the transaction details to the systems, departments and third parties who need to spring into action to fulfill it.

You deserve the gift of time.

Negotiating the Deal: Technology’s Disservice to Seafood, Part 2

 

How do you negotiate the terms of the deal?

(price, quantity, payment terms, delivery, and more)

Dealboard’s research indicates the overwhelming majority of the seafood industry relies on text messaging – Skype, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat and more.

Here is yet another example of technology under-serving the seafood industry, because these methods of communication introduce problematic situations for something as important as the terms of the deal for a large seafood transaction between two companies.

Problem 1: Did the Chicken or the Egg Come First?

Seafood deals require agreement on a lot of different terms and conditions, requiring exchange of many messages to arrive at an agreement.

Unfortunately, since messages cross each other, the sequence in which you see your messages may not be the same as the sequence seen by the recipient. This means you see the discussion differently.

Consider how confusing it is to rely on text messaging for something much simpler than negotiating a seafood transaction - such as arranging to meet my son for dinner later in the week. This simple task falls down under the constraints of text messaging. To understand why, read the text exchange pictured below:

What is it that we agreed to, exactly? I have no idea whether he likes the time, the first location, or the second location I proposed.

Text messaging leaves dangerously wide room for interpretation. Do you want your trading partners to misunderstand shipping information? Payment terms? Price or quantity?

Problem 2: The Single Thread

Text messaging is convenient, but it reduces communication between parties to a single thread. If you communicate with someone frequently, that's a long thread! It becomes tremendously difficult to scroll back in time to review what was agreed some time ago. 

What happens when you're negotiating with one person about the mussels, but also the cod? It is nearly impossible to keep track of which text messages relate to which product offers.

Problem 3: Privacy, and Preserving Your Margin

How many times have you, or someone you know, accidentally replied on the wrong thread? When this happens in our personal lives it's embarrassing, but when it happens in professional life you are probably giving away critical information which could harm your negotiations and rob you of available margin.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a better, cleaner way to negotiate seafood transactions that was just as easy as text messaging, but with none of the shortcomings associated with that generic technology?

That's where Dealboard comes in. Stop being under-served... learn more or sign up for a free trial at www.dealboard.biz.