Midwest IT Survival

Get sales to speed your support case to resolution

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 Category

• How to Leverage Tech Support

In the previous article, we looked at the importance of opening a vendor support case for technical issues and following the process to the letter to avoid process fumbling to reflect poorly on you and your team.  In this article, we look to engage the Vendor Sales Cheese when the vendor technical support case isn’t getting resolved effectively and how to turn this around to drive beneficial pricing.

Drag the Vendor Sales Cheese into the technical support problem

One thing a good Vendor Sales Cheese is effective at is getting folks within his or her organization to move quickly to close a sales deal.  Why not leverage that ability to your advantage to put more pressure on solving your technical support issue so you and your team can move on to more important work?

If you haven’t had your technical support case solve the problem, your technical support case probably looks something like this:

Day 1 = Your Team: problem reported, steps to re-create the problem shared, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 2 = Vendor: “Try changing setting <blah>.<blah>.<blah> from TRUE to FALSE and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 2 = Your Team: Setting changed, problem still exists, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 3 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 4 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 4 = Vendor: “Please download patch 3498345, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 4 = Your Team: Patch applied, service now crashes immediately upon starting, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 6 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 7 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 8 = Vendor: “Please uninstall patch 3498345 and download patch 3498350, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 8 = Your Team: First patch removed, second patch installed, problem still exists, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 9 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 10 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 11 = Vendor: “Please download patch 3498351, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 11 = Your Team: update the case with “we are not even running that version of your software on our technology platform as already indicated in the case and thus we cannot install that patch.  Now what?”

Day 12 = Your Team: request status on case

Clearly, you and your team are burning hours on this issue and not making much progress and worse, not getting quality service from the vendor without any real resolution in sight.  Time to get the Vendor Sales Cheese involved:

Boss: “Hey, Vendor Sales Cheese, it is Boss from ABC Company.  Can you take a look at support case number 596784 we just opened?  I think we are getting the run around after the case has been opened for 12 days.  Heck, the last entry from your support asks us to install a patch that doesn’t even match our technology platform which is clearly needed to open the case in the first place.”

Vendor Sales Cheese: “This doesn’t sound right.  Let me look into this right away and get back to you.”

Boss: “By the way, we need this issue fixed otherwise it is going to be brought up in our license renewal discussions next week/month.  I can’t believe it is time to talk about new licenses already.”

Vendor Sales Cheese: <with even more urgency> “Don’t worry; I’ll get to the bottom of this straight away.”

The key to this whole exchange is to link the need for this technical support case to be closed to the next sales opportunity.  Besides being in the Vendor Sales Cheese’s positive relationship interest, now, more importantly, it is a barrier to a sales interest.  You now have a highly motivated sales person to put pressure on the technical support arm of the vendor’s organization to clear through the process morass and get the problem resolved as quickly as possible.

Finally, how can consistent tracking of vendor technical support cases drive beneficial pricing?

By keeping an accurate track of each poorly handled support case and creating a plausible story that suggests a consistent struggle with the existing support arrangement can pay dividends.  Those dividends may not be in explicit price reductions, but thee could be.  Rather, you may find you have leverage to get an improved support arrangement for the same price.  The Vendor Sales Cheese may be able to add in something similar to:

• Ability to use a “priority code” to have your tickets skip the first level of support and go directly to a stronger second tier
• Ability to use an inside “customer advocate” that you can drag into cases the minute they start trending negative or as soon as you open the case and want to impress upon the vendor the urgency or severity of the issue and need for fast resolution
• Improved SLAs which actually improve your ability to get cases routed to experts rather than just artificial improvements such as “response time for a new case from 24 hours to 12 hours” which look good on paper but only provide case acknowledgement slightly sooner and no change to resolution expectations

Thus, not usually direct dollars off the top, the ability to negotiate an improved support arrangement without impacting the price ultimately benefits you, your team and your company with lower overhead involved in getting product technical issues resolved more quickly.

In addition to these perspectives on achieving beneficial pricing, can anyone share additional techniques to link poor technical support case experiences to squeeze out the best pricing scenarios for your company?  Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with more MidWestern IT perspectives on the topic of the “Product Versioning and the Upgrade Cycle” in the spectrum of vendor management.

How to get to the light at the end of the support case tunnel!

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 Category

• How to Leverage Tech Support

In the previous article, we looked at techniques such as “Good Cop”, “Bad Cop” to drive more beneficial pricing for your company.  In this article, we take yet another angle at the Vendor Management topic with a look at how to leverage the vendor’s technical support for results and pricing pressure.

Bob the Engineer: “Hey, we are getting the FlimFlam backend service throwing error 57’s again in production?  Anyone want to bet me the phones are going to start lighting up with everyone concerned about system stability?”

Joe the Engineer: “Can’t we just restart the service quickly?  No one would know.  We know the error will go away for awhile.  It is probably a memory leak of some kind.”

<ring, ring>

Sally the Engineer: “Too late, the panic is already starting.”

Boss: “Can I have a volunteer to capture those log files and open a case with FlimFlam tech support?”

Sure, the temptation is there to immediately restart the service and hope the problem goes away.  Sure, once you start down the path of resolving this annoying yet not life threatening problem you have to see it all the way to resolution otherwise you are even worse off.  Worse off in that you have lost the “surprised and confused” defense option (see previous article on this defensive topic).  You can’t be surprised by a system error that you already opened a ticket with the vendor’s technical support.  Thus, how can you leverage this support problem into a positive of service quality and vendor beneficial pricing?

First step, you have to open a support issue or ticket with the vendor through the vendor’s product technical support process.  Make sure you follow the process of entering a support issue into the vendor’s product technical support system to the letter.  The last thing you need when participating in a “root cause analysis” meeting is to have the vendor brought in to the fray only to cause grief with a procedural miss step such as:

Vendor Support Representative: “Why did it take us more than 24 hours to respond to your trouble ticket?  Let me see … ah, your company has an Yttrium Support Contract.  But, in order to get that fast response, you need to flag your ticket with your Yttrium Support Resource’s name ‘Bob’.  According to the ticket history, it never got assigned by your engineer to ‘Bob’ …”

As you probably can imagine, the vendor support engineers probably have all kinds of internal as well as external SLAs (service level agreements) and metrics to meet.  Thus, the vendor support representative that gets assigned your ticket is looking for the fastest way to change the status of the ticket to stop the clock on their metric and move the ticket to a status of “waiting on the customer”.  Thus, be prepared for typical responses such as “please provide current version and patch level by running the <blah> command” or “please provide a system log file and a screen shot of the error”.  You might as well coach your team to provide as much of this information up front when creating the ticket to reduce the back and forth delay between your team and the vendor in order to get the vendor working on the problem as quickly as possible.

Now, as painful as it might seem or as much of a waste of time as it might seem, if the vendor support rep wants additional log information or they want your team to try a patch or updated product or component version, you need to follow through.  Sure, your lead engineer knows that the problem doesn’t magically go away with the mythical vendor software patch, but you have to still go through the process, otherwise:

Vendor Support Representative: “You are still getting error 57?  Let me check your case … ah, I see we asked you to try applying patch number 39483 to your system because that fixes the problem.  Did you try that patch?”

Thus, in the root cause analysis process you will be at a disadvantage for not following through the technical support ticket process and battling back with “we know that patch won’t fix the problem because we know …” is a challenging argument to win against peers that have no first hand confidence in your lead engineer’s expert analysis.

By completing the vendor’s technical support process, you should be left with steps to take to eliminate “error 57” from ever interrupting your team’s work again and reducing your face time in the root cause analysis process.  But what if you are making no progress in resolving the issue?  Here is where the Vendor Sales Cheese can be exceedingly handy.

Drag the Vendor Sales Cheese into the technical support problem

In addition to these perspectives on the importance of leveraging the vendor’s technical support process, what other experiences have people had to suggest this arduous process is needed to deliver quality services back to your company?  Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with the role the Vendor Sales Cheese can play in driving efficiency and how to turn this whole situation around to drive beneficial pricing.

Time for some Good Cop, Bad Cop to save some coin?

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 Category

• Sales Cycle and Pricing

In the previous article, we looked at some possible value of being direct and to the point with the caveats that one still needs to maintain an up to date relationship with your Vendor Sales Cheeses.  Some of that value being related to pricing which is where this article picks up the Vendor Management discussion.

There are a number of good sales cycle and pricing articles out there that help give some context as to how technology products are priced to the customer keeping the sales cycle in mind.  I recommend Joel Spolsky’s article “Camels and Rubber Duckies” or for a brief specific example, David Cummings’s article “Software Pricing Proportionate to Sales Cycle”.

How do these apply to the average MidWest company?  In my experience, the sales cycles are rather long in the average MidWest company.  The time it takes a vendor to go through the procurement process at an average MidWest company is exceedingly lengthy with all of the request for proposals and product demos upon product demos upon product demos.  Throw in some security reviews and contract language disputes and it could take months with no guarantee the company will actually buy the product.  All it takes is a re-organization of some key group or groups related to the vendor’s product during the procurement process and a whole new approach can be born that doesn’t involve the vendor’s product anymore.  Unless someone very high in the organization that is less likely to be significantly impacted by a re-organization is creating the urgency to get this vendor’s product in house and implemented, the more likely the sales cycle will be long and drawn out.

So, how does a manager of an engineering team within a large MidWest company have a positive affect on pricing for their company given this morass of process and bureaucracy?  The technique presented below suggests one can indeed have a positive impact on pricing even given the lengthy and arduous procurement process:

Traditional “Good Cop, Bad Cop”

One highly effective mechanism I’ve scene is when the manager of the engineering team comes across as the “Good Cop” and essentially the vendor advocate and their management fills the role of “Bad Cop”.  “Bad Cop” in the sense of giving every indication they don’t believe the vendor’s product is the right product for the company for some reason in addition to the product costing too much.  Maybe they give off every indication they have a preference for a competing product but you, as the engineering manager, really feel the vendor’s product is the right fit.  You and your management have concluded that the vendor’s product to be the right fit, but you agree to take this approach to motivate the vendor to provide additional incentives above and beyond the core product offering that will benefit the company and not destroy the profit margin the vendor is trying to achieve with the sale.  Maybe the vendor is willing to knock the price down even more than the “lowest possible” previously communicated price.  Maybe the vendor is willing to throw in two days of free on site training.  Maybe the vendor is willing to include additional licenses to products under the same maintenance cost structure.  Whatever the “maybe” might be, your roll in playing the “Good Cop” helps to give the vendor there is a high probability that the sale will complete, but it isn’t a done deal until something sways the “Bad Cop”.

Any side or longer term benefit to playing the “Good Cop” role?  Absolutely by being viewed by the vendor as a product advocate within the company.  This will significantly help you when you need to get timely technical support from the vendor as the Vendor Sales Cheese will link you and your role as “Good Cop” in helping him or her complete the sale and thus will work harder to get you the support from within the vendor that you will need down the road.  See this previous article [] for more details on how this need for technical support is critical and how the Vendor Sales Cheese plays an important role.

Another side benefit to appear as the vendor advocate within the company is access to early information on the vendor’s product roadmap as well as the ability to get customer feedback into that product roadmap process.  This doesn’t guarantee you will get that much needed feature into the vendor’s next release, but it sure increases your chances of getting more ear bending of the vendor’s product management that otherwise possible.

Is there anything else you can do to have a positive impact on the product pricing?

Remember the sales cycle from the last article?  Well, knowing the vendors quarter ends and most beneficial, year ends, target any budget license upgrade or renewal discussions around those important dates.  As an example: look to discuss yearly license purchases to coincide with the vendor’s year end if you represent a product that has a per user license.  The Vendor Sales Cheese will have the most leverage to come up with creative pricing prior to his or her year end compared to any other time of the year.  Couple your vendor year end license upgrade discussions with some “Good Cop” and “Bad Copy” technique and you can help drive some very beneficial pricing.

How about another take on driving beneficial pricing?

This can be a powerful one, thus use it sparingly, you may only get once chance to use this one.

Hint at pressure from somewhere in the organization that there is momentum building to replace the vendor’s product with the competition’s product.

Sales Training 101 says that it is way cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to get a new customer to buy your product.  Thus, the Vendor Sales Cheese does not want to lose your business and can use the threat of potential loss to break the possible log jam within his or her sales organization to get rock bottom pricing.  Why is this only a one time technique?  After successfully using this technique to get super discounted pricing, coming back for a second round is likely to put you in the “our margin is now so slim, any lower and they might as well go switch to the competition … or they are out right fibbing” category and lose any credibility or priority attention points you have accumulated thus far.

By the way, this technique works even better if within your company, two competing products are being used.  It is completely plausible that a procurement group focusing on reducing the number of vendors to manage would have a business case to reduce the duplicity down to one vendor for a given service.  Thus, playing one vendor off of the other to see who is willing to really stretch their margins to keep your business can be extremely effective at maximizing the beneficial pricing.  As the perceived vendor advocate, you can even use the plausible angle of: “Hey, I need you guys to stay here otherwise why do I need to be employed anymore if the company goes with the other product” to support your claims for added plausibility.

In addition to these perspectives on achieving beneficial pricing, can anyone share additional techniques to squeeze out the best pricing scenarios for your company?  Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with more MidWestern IT perspectives on the topic of the “Leveraging Technical Support” in the spectrum of vendor management.