Midwest IT Survival

Whether you are working in a complete custom software development shop with little vendor interaction or a technology integration shop with vendor solutions integrated with other vendor solutions on top of yet other vendor solutions, you will have to manage vendor relationships to some degree as an IT manager in a MidWestern company.  This series looks at the complex arena of IT vendor management and offers some tips to make the arduous process a bit less arduous and possibly discover some additional benefits along the way.

Vendor Management Categories

• Role of the Sales Rep

Leverage your Vendor Sales Cheese to avoid the Architecture Astronauts!

In the previous article [], we explored how this role can benefit the IT engineer by cutting through the bologna that is the normal route to getting technical support from a vendor and putting one in direct contact with a peer senior technical resource that can solve tough problems quickly.  But what about the benefits to an IT manager?

IT Manager Dividends

Scenario 1 – You Don’t Have Bob the Engineer from the Previous Example

Well, let’s start with that same hypothetical problem scenario in the previous post [] with a production problem being reported in the service you and your team are responsible for, in this case the FlimFlam software.  You don’t have a Bob that has introduced himself to the Vendor Sales Cheese and established himself as the guy, that when he reports a problem with FlimFlam, there is indeed a problem with FlimFlam and Bob needs senior tech support ASAP.  It not, the Vendor Sales Cheese is going to spend his or her value time not selling but rather in fire suppression mode.

Once you notice your team is stuck in the troubleshooting process with the FlimFlam software and the trouble ticket that is open with the vendor is going no where, have your Vendor Sales Cheese contact info handy:

Sally the Manager: “Hey, Vendor Sales Cheese, it is Sally at ABC Company.  Well, no, everything isn’t quite fine.  We’ve got a problem.  FlimFlam is causing customer pain and is throwing an error 57 that no one, not even the tech folks behind your support web site are able to figure out.  You know I don’t waste your time with the trivial stuff, thus this isn’t trivial.  I am about to get on a conference call to explain to my peer management that we have our top engineers working on the problem but I don’t have a good answer when they ask what the vendor of FlimFlam is doing to aide us.  Yes, you can help, that is why I called.  Can you get a senior tech person to look at support ticket <blah> and then have that senior tech person call Joe on my team at <blah> to start resolving the issue?  I have your commitment someone is going to call Joe, right?  Good … now I have a much better story to tell everyone on the conference call.  I’ll be in touch.”

Similar to the previous example, you can leverage your relationship with the Vendor Sales Cheese to get priority service.  From a management perspective, you have just increased the technical capacity of your team without incurring any additional cost by leveraging the notion that the Vendor Sales Cheese would rather have a happy customer for which they can manage this problem more proactively since they were engaged early in the problem resolution process.  Any experienced Vendor Sales Cheese that been set on proverbial fire coming into a customer hot zone with threats of having the vendor and all provided products and services throw out because high level management had to get involved with a problem that, to them and rest of the organization, should never have occurred in the first place.  High level management sees the $$$ from their budget going to these monthly maintenance fees to their vendors as insurance that they will never have to directly deal with a problem caused by the vendor.  The Vendor Sales Cheese that can get engaged in a hot problem early, bring the right level of technical support and relationship support at the highest level and make the problem go away quick has actually earned positive face time with higher levels in the customer organization.  Their bet is the higher levels in the customer organization will see the support value in addition to product feature set from the vendor and look for that vendor to provide future solutions.

Thus, if the issue is heating up in your organization and you don’t have a Bob that has dragged the vendor into the troubleshooting mix, get on the phone to the Vendor Sales Cheese and give the Vendor Sales Cheese the opportunity to augment your team’s technical capacity as well as the opportunity to manage the customer relationship early rather then when asbestos underwear will be required later.

IT Manager Dividends

Scenario 2 – You Have Bob the Engineer

In this scenario, Bob on your team has already brought the vendor into the troubleshooting effort.  So, all you have to do is put your feet up on your desk and watch the magic happen as Bob and the senior vendor resource solve the issue before the day is over.  Well, you could, but what if it is 6PM and Bob and the vendor are stuck after hours of troubleshooting?  Once Bob has reached out to the Vendor Sales Cheese, wait a brief amount of time and then make a follow-up call yourself.  Let the Vendor Sales Cheese know that of all the problems you wrestle with every day, this one has your highest priority attention.  This further emphasizes to the Vendor Sales Cheese that this problem could become the problem that has the Vendor Sales Cheese sending $300+ an hour vendor solution architects to your company for free to appease the post resolution craziness that will surely develop if this problem isn’t given top priority and resolved in short order.

Sure, the Vendor Sales Cheese will quickly become high maintenance because they have had to work with customers in postmortems where a bunch of company architecture astronauts are swooping in after the system has been stabilized to philosophize on how a completely different solution that doesn’t even involve the vendor’s technology would be the best approach for senior management to implement to avoid this type of problem in the future.  The experienced Vendor Sales Cheese knows that once they are up against the customer’s architecture astronauts, the customer’s senior management has lost faith the vendor can save them from getting involved in distracting support issues.  Plus, senior management gets to throw out a vendor that failed and proceed to be courted by new vendors salivating at getting the opportunity to make the sale and have the “we replaced vendor X at company Y” story to enhance their sales pitches of the future.

Again, be prepared for the Vendor Sales Cheese to be high maintenance, but take comfort in the constant polling for status can easily be a positive when you need the vendor to jump higher and you already have the Vendor Sales Cheese with full issue context ready to say “how high?”

This concludes the perspectives on the role of the sale representative short of their role in the sales cycle and pricing.  I’ll dive into this aspect in the next article with more MidWestern IT perspectives on the topic of the “Sales Cycle and Pricing” in the spectrum of vendor management.

Related posts:

1. Vendor Management – Part 9 – Role of the Sales Rep – Part 2
2. Vendor Management – Part 8 – Role of the Sales Rep – Part 1
3. Vendor Management – Part 7 – Vendor Service Integration Challenges Continued
4. Vendor Management – Part 6 – Vendor Service Integration Challenges
5. Vendor Management – Part 5 – More on Who Owns the Relationship