Selling to companies: how a training or software seller gets onto a vendor list

The L&D head liked the session plan and said, "Send your documents to procurement, they will create a vendor code." Three weeks on, the form has come back twice and nobody has raised a purchase order. A training or software seller gets onto a company's vendor list in two moves: win a sponsor inside the company, then send procurement one complete vendor pack. The pack holds a short profile, registrations, bank proof, references and a one-page terms sheet. It does not win the deal. It stops a deal you have won from dying in the vendor form.

Who actually puts you on the list?

Mostly not procurement. A user department goes looking for a trainer or a software tool, not the purchase team: the L&D head who wants a negotiation workshop, the plant IT head who wants an attendance app. That person is your sponsor. Procurement comes later, to check that you can be paid without trouble and to issue the vendor code.

A cold email to the procurement inbox lands with a team that has no budget for you. The exception is the large group or public sector company with an open supplier portal for empanelment. Registering there puts you in the pool. Someone inside still has to pick you. What an HR head checks before shortlisting a training vendor covers the sponsor's side.

The vendor pack, in the order procurement reads it

Keep the pack to one PDF under ten pages.

1. A cover note of one page. The sponsor's name and department, what they are buying, and one person on your side who handles paperwork.
2. The company profile, two pages at most. Legal name exactly as on the GST certificate, what you sell and who buys it. Our note on what a company profile should include goes section by section.
3. Registrations and bank proof. The standard set is listed in our note on getting onto an approved vendor list.
4. Two references. Named people at comparable companies who have agreed to take a call, with that agreement in writing.
5. The terms sheet, described in the next section.
6. Trainer profiles or security answers, depending on what you sell.
7. The buyer's own vendor form, every field filled, signed and stamped. Write "not applicable" where a field does not apply. A blank field reads as a field you forgot.

Day rates, licence fees and the box procurement fills in for you

The vendor form has a box for payment terms, and if you leave it empty, procurement fills in the company's standard. As an illustration, it may come back reading "payment 60 days from receipt of a correct invoice, PO number mandatory"; your buyer's figure will differ. Once the purchase order carries that, it is very hard to change.

Put a one-page terms sheet in the pack that answers five things:

• How you bill: per training day, per batch of participants, per user per year, or a licence fee plus a one-time setup charge.
• What you need in advance. Software licences and printed course material are reasonable to bill before work starts; trainer days are easier to bill on delivery.
• The payment period you can carry, and the price if the buyer needs longer credit.
• Anything the price leaves out: trainer travel and stay, the venue, participant kits, content customisation, data migration.
• How the invoice should be raised: against which purchase order, and to which GST number if the buyer is registered in several states.

The rule: if the buyer's standard credit period is longer than your cash can carry, raise it with your sponsor before the purchase order is issued. Accounts rarely change it afterwards.

Training sellers and software sellers are checked on different things

The core pack is the same for both. What sits on top is not.

A training firm is checked on the person. Add a profile for each trainer, with the languages they teach in, a two-page programme outline, and what happens if the named trainer falls ill the week before.

A software seller is checked on data. Expect the IT team to send an information security questionnaire. It asks where data is hosted, who on your side can see it, how backups run and what happens to the data when the contract ends. Answer it once, carefully, and keep the answers as a master. If your app holds employees' personal details, it will also ask how you handle them under data protection law. Those rules change, so check with your own adviser before you write a promise into the form.

An attendance app and a lost month

Take an invented case, comparison included: a small Coimbatore company that sells an attendance and leave app to factories. The HR manager at a spinning mill near Tiruppur likes the trial and asks for "your documents for vendor registration". The founder sends a brochure, a phone photo of the GST certificate and one line: "Please let me know what else is needed."

Procurement replies with the mill's vendor form. The founder fills half of it. The cancelled cheque is from an account in the founder's personal name, opened before the company was registered, so the form comes back. Then the mill's IT consultant, who had never been part of the conversation, sends a security questionnaire. By the time it is answered, the HR manager has moved the spend to the next quarter.

The founder moved collections to a current account in the company's name, built the pack above and wrote the security answers in advance. At the next mill they asked, at the first meeting, who else would approve, and sent all of them the pack the day the trial ended. Nothing was missing, so the form went through first time, and the vendor code arrived in under two weeks instead of the six the first mill took. The first mill's order was still lost, because the quarter had moved.

When the pack is the wrong first move

Skip it, and the portal registrations too, when you have no sponsor and no live conversation. Registering on every large company's supplier portal produces logins nobody uses. Spend that time finding the department head who has the problem; outbound sales prospecting is that work.

Skip the full pack for small one-off purchases too: a company buying one workshop may pay on a proforma invoice. Ask your sponsor how they pay a new supplier.

Start from the form that came back

Open the last vendor form a company sent you and list every field you could not fill on the first attempt. That list is the start of your pack. Make the profile something a sponsor can forward without editing; capability presentations are built for that reader, and technology is the wider section for software sellers. If you want help with the pack, or with finding the sponsors who come before it, tell us what you need.