About time to get a call from your Vendor Sales Cheese
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
- Sales Cycle and Pricing
In the previous article, we concluded the perspectives on the role of the sale representative closing with the IT manager dividends that get paid from the Vendor Sales Cheese’s retained earnings if you permit me to use a weak accounting balance sheet analogy. We stopped short of how the Vendor Sales Cheese responds and reacts throughout the sales cycle and their role in pricing. This article will dive into this aspect of Vendor Management.
Vendor Sales Cheese and the Sales Cycle
If you have had any Vendor Sales Cheese interaction, you’ve probably noticed a slight pattern to the timing of the communications. Do you notice you get more email chatter and messages on your voicemail to “catch up” or “hey, how about we get together for lunch” around the end of the month? How about the end of the quarter? Ever wondered why there seems to be more artificial urgency at certain times compared to others? This pattern of communication timing all resolves around the “sales cycle”.
When I refer to the sales cycle, what I mean is the periodic deadlines, created by the vendor, that establish when sales activities get measured. If you are familiar with application development, it is a parallel to a code freeze. A point in time when all the <sales> “hey, I almost have customer X signing on the dotted line to buy a 1,000 user license of product X” and <application development> “hey, I have just a few more lines of code to write and feature number 375 will be ready for testing” have to stop and be counted. For the Vendor Sales Cheese, who is always working on “the deal”, there comes a point where if there isn’t something in writing confirming the sale will be made at a fixed date, the “the deal” doesn’t equal “a sale”.
Now, I have always been representing the customer in the vendor/customer side of “the deal”. I would appreciate if someone who has been on the vendor side of the equation to provide more depth and support for what is going on over on the vendor side of the equation.
From what I have been able to determine from my customer perspective, these “sales freeze” occur primarily at the end of the quarter and then again at the end of the vendor company’s fiscal year. Note, not every company has the same fiscal year end. Year end being when a company says “my year is done as of X date, start closing the accounting books on the current year. Now open new books for the next year”. Thus we come for the first recommendation for this topic:
- For every vendor, establish when their “sales freezes” are as well as their fiscal year end.
Once established, you will pretty much be able to predict when you will get a phone call from the Vendor Sales Cheese from each vendor. The calls will come in a week or so before the “sales freeze” date with some predictable push to try and determine if you are in any position to buy something the Vendor Sales Cheese is selling. As the calls come in, and they will, you will most likely be in no position to buy something, but before you go about your daily routine, consider:
Perspective = You are in no position/need/want to buy anything at this time
You have absolutely no need or want or desire to buy anything from anyone at this time. Thus, the Vendor Sales Cheese calls, which you know are going to start coming in from various vendors as a “sales freeze” approaches, can be handled in a variety of ways:
Option:
- Answer the phone with: ”Go away, I’m busy.”
- Everything goes to voicemail with no follow-up
- Scam free lunch: “Sure, let’s go to lunch and talk about whatever and then I’ll mention I don’t/can’t buy anything.”
- Direct and to the point: “Appreciate the call, but I’m not interested in anything at this time.”
Option 1 and 2 = “Go away, I’m busy.” + Everything goes to voicemail with no follow-up
Recommendation = don’t use option 1 or option2
Sure, this might be the first response that comes to ones mind that is full of more pressing day to day technical issues. But, remember a few articles back where the Vendor Sales Cheese role was introduced. Once you have purchased and integrated a vendor product or solution into you and your team’s service back to the business, you, whether you like it or not, have entered into a symbiotic relationship with the vendor to some degree. As much as you may think: “hey, I can just toss out vendor X and get vendor Y’s solution in here tomorrow”, know it just isn’t that easy. Swapping in vendor Y’s solution means going through the procurement process, pulling resources from in flight efforts to your replacement effort, getting people to test something that seems to be working already and ultimately implementing the new solution which just replaces what is already inexistence. You know this pain. The vendor knows you know this pain. Depending on the depth of the vendor’s solution integration with your critical business functions, the higher the switching cost and the Vendor Sales Cheese knows this as well.
Potentially more important, when you run into a technical jam that your team can’t work around, you really need the vendor to provide some expertise. You’ll need the Vendor Sales Cheese to pull the strings needed to get you quick, expert help. Sure, you might think no matter how hard you beat up on the Vendor Sales Cheese every minute, they still have to drop everything and give you top service the next minute. But consider that the Vendor Sales Cheese has a big custom list with varying revenue streams and technical competencies. If you aren’t the top revenue stream with a potential for additional new sales volume within the next sales cycle, you may lose out to the customer that better fits that profile. The Vendor Sales Cheese is going to put energy into the customer that provides them the most potential new sales opportunity. Most likely, you are not constantly buying from this vendor, thus you won’t perpetually be within this high potential customer range continuously. Constantly blowing off the Vendor Sales Cheese will put you far down in the list of customers worth putting any additional effort towards and could come back to bite you when you need the Vendor Sales Cheese to step up and help you out in the future.
Not convinced? Consider how much sales is the juxtaposing of your highly technical world. Your highly technical world is based on logic, binary systems connected to other binary systems with a guaranteed root cause to every problem if you just dig effectively. “Sales” is completely people and relationship based. People and relationships are the opposite of predictive and logical. You are content with a system that handles spikes in transaction volumes across varying payloads with statistically insignificant changes in CPU utilization. The Vendor Sales Cheese is content with a potential customer who has a strong need for a product or service the Vendor Sales Cheese is representing who has revealed his or her emotional hand that they are “sold” on the product or service to the point that they are putting pen to paper, signing a letter of intent to purchase.
So, more convinced Option 1 and 2 hurt your potential future needs from the Vendor Sales Cheese? Which remaining option is best? Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with more MidWestern IT perspectives on the topic of the “Sales Cycle and Pricing” in the spectrum of vendor management.
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