Your Relationship With Vendors Probably Sucks
And How to Fix It
When I was a Senior Analyst, there was a period of time I needed support from a vendor to get access to an API key that I knew we had as a resource. Trying to figure out how to get access to this resource was a bit of hurdle jumping. No one on the team knew who to reach out to, our managers didn’t know, and our Government counterparts also didn’t know.
I ended up using the generic support email to reach out to the Vendor, who got back to me in a few days. The individual I spoke to was our account rep for the vendor, who easily enough passed along the API key I needed to plug in the feed. Weeks thereafter, I would receive emails and phone calls from this same individual asking for time from me specifically to set up a meeting and go over their products and service offerings… But I was just an analyst? I would have no control or buying power to ever hope to have an influence on these decisions to procure. Shoot, because of how government SOCs work, I don’t think even our SOC Manager had the authority to have those kinds of conversations.
Because of this, I just ignored attempts by this account rep to come in, in the belief that they were just trying to sell me something. Now, I see things differently in my current role as a systems engineer.
Understanding How Your Vendor Works
Vendors sell things. That’s what they do. Whether it be products or services, their goal is to provide you with solutions to your problems. They do this by providing three tiers of support and interaction. I’ll break them down here:
Presales
Presales is the first line of contact with Vendors. When you’re searching for a new solution or looking to add on to your current one, the presales team is where these interactions usually start. They’re comprised of usually two, but sometimes one, individuals who specialize in two things. Here are some common roles you’ll encounter in this team format:
Account Executive - These individuals are responsible for the contractual requirements, quoting, and purchase order oversight. They manage the account from a relationship and a business perspective, as well as introduce products and services (usually via slideshow). They’re also sometimes called an Account Representative, Sales Manager, or Account Manager.
Sales Engineer - These individuals are responsible for the technical requirements, demoing products and services, and supporting product evaluations. They’re responsible for ensuring that you’re informed and enabled on the product from a technical level, and break the ‘information asymmetry,’ as it’s called. They’re also sometimes called a Systems Engineer, Presales Engineer, or Solutions Engineer.
Technical Account Manager - In teams of one, these individuals are armies of one, combining both engineer and executive. They specialize in usually one area of a product or service but are able to deliver end-to-end presales support.
Sales Architect - Usually reserved for being product specialists, architects are responsible for designing custom use cases or from-the-ground-up solutions for customers when ‘out-of-the-box’ use cases aren’t aligning with the needs of the customer. They’re also sometimes called Solutions Architects or Product Architects.
Customer Support/Success
CS, as it's often abbreviated, is a team of dedicated individuals who usually support you in a postsales engagement. When you’ve procured your product or service, you typically engage these individuals in ‘break-fix’ issues and troubleshooting. The product isn’t working the way it was intended? Need help patching or backing up a service? These are usually the individuals who support those types of engagements. There are usually three major roles in CS:
CS Manager - This individual is similar to an account executive, and is responsible for relationships in a postsales environment, where they can maintain a direct line of contact, usually in the form of a weekly, monthly, or quarterly cadence, to just check in and hear customer grievances, issues, and help direct them to resources as needed.
CS Engineer - This individual is similar to a Sales Engineer, as they are responsible for providing on-demand engineering support for customer issues.
CS Architect - Likely encountered when you first procure a product, an architect is going to help understand your deployment and give deployment recommendations, along with setting you up on the path to success with your usage of the product or service. They may also be used in scenarios where something is broken, and a more custom fix may be required.
Professional Services
PS is the counterpart to CS, in that PS is more hands-on support for your deployment of a product or service. Their role is not just to be there when things break, but to provide you with support for daily operations. PS roles are far more flexible than Presales and CS. Here are a few common ones:
Project Managers - PS Managers are individuals responsible for managing a PS engagement and supporting your deployment and mission while you have services you purchased.
Consultants - PS Consultants are individuals who cover a wide variety of roles and needs based on the engagement. They’re a ‘one-sized-fits-all’ approach to covering the basis for all needs and are usually individuals who engage other technical resources as needed.
Technical Staff - Whether you hired engineers to manage a deployment or analysts to support daily operations, technical PS staff are there to provide a wide variety of support functions with the goal of ensuring success in operations and providing direct support from the vendor. Oftentimes, these individuals work directly with CS resources to give you a full blanket of coverage on managing and supporting the product or service you procured.
Should I Trust My Vendors?
As you can tell, this is actually a pretty extensive list, and for good reason. Vendors have a fiduciary duty to make sure that both before you procure and after you procure, you’re supported every step of the way and are enabled to be successful with your product or service. Why? Because money, that’s why. As much as it can be sales gimmicky, vendors ultimately want to solve your problems. It keeps them honest, which also makes them the most money when they are honest. That being said, of course not every account rep and an engineer is going to play square, but more often than not, I don’t encounter this in my role or with those I work with. It simply just doesn’t work long-term to be an ass or to be pushy on a sale.
What winds up happening when it does happen is that things end up breaking somewhere during an eval, or worse, after the purchase order, and it can’t be fixed and it isn’t working as intended. Thus the relationship is soured and people are unhappy because you’ve wasted their time and money on something that isn’t solving their problems anymore, and is likely making more problems too. On the flip side, an individual who procures something for their organization that ends up wasting time and money is going to be looked at like a fool too. If you think this is good for business, it simply isn’t.
That’s why it’s important we maintain honesty and commitment to our engagements.
Who You Gonna Call?
So now that we’ve broken down who the people are, what they do, and that you should trust them, how do we engage our vendors? Here are a few common scenarios to think about:
When you have a problem and want to see if they have a solution. - Reach out to your Presales Team
When you have a problem with a product you procured - Reach out to your CS Team
When you have a problem with a product you’re evaluating - Reach out to your Presales Team
You need a briefing on a product or service a vendor has - Reach out to your Presales Team
You need an executive-level engagement with your vendor - Reach out to your Presales Team
You need some guidance on proper usage/best practices of a product you procured - Reach out to your CS Team
Notice I didn’t include moments to talk to the PS Team. The reason being is that when you have PS, you should always engage them first on questions and issues, and let them determine what team should be involved if any. You paid for PS, don’t sit there and think ‘we just bought it, let’s conserve hours until we actually need it’, only to waste ten months of the time when you could’ve used it, then have to find reasons to spend the last two months carving away at unused PS Hours before they expire and your organization just wasted a whole bunch of money (if you prepurchased hours, that is).
Hope this makes things clear as mud!
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