Donna Taylor, CEO, ITB
Which vendor behaviour or traits do you love the most, and want to see more of?
This is a small list as I am not expecting a vendor to do a deal for me, but the below is important to me. There are very few vendors that work to this model and they would certainly be more professional if they could adopt these actions:
* Communication and proactively calling you.
* Honesty and integrity when working a deal and working it as a partnership.
* Trust and relationships. As the saying goes “people buy from people”, so it is very important to build a strong business relationship with your account manager for your customer.
What do they do that irritates or frustrates you?
It is also very difficult to name one thing as there are some serious bad habits that can run through the vendor market that also translates down to some distributors. The relationship should be a three-way partnership if the vendor works with the disti. You have two types of disti: those who work with you; and those who don’t give a damn which reseller it goes through. I have to put the trust and relationship comment in here too as this is where it can fall down and badly affect the business end goal.
One of the biggest issues is when you have bought a deal to the vendor’s attention and you do the first call, do the deal reg, and then you find that the internal account manager has come up with some bogus statement saying they have been working with ‘x’ and the deal needs to go to them. You obviously have a relationship with your customer so you know that it is not true. It can go two ways. The customer can either support you and tell them to get lost, or they don’t want to be involved in politics and YOUR deal moves away. Not good!
* No single point of contact (not getting passed around as no one wants to deal with it!)
* Generic email addresses… so frustrating when you have an urgent issue.. sales@; Customerservices@; cybersecurity@…. Not good
* Not following their OWN channel processes and moving them to suit themselves
* Ignoring emails
* Asking you to jump through hoops, technical and sales, and then not agreeing to do a deal reg until THEY have spoken to the customer; why ask us to do all this if you don’t trust us to do the sale in the first instance…? Trust and relationship again!
* Going direct to customers and cutting you out… so bad, so rude, and so annoying. And it does not lend itself to demonstrating a strong relationship.
* Quotes taking two weeks …. Seriously !
* SKOs at the beginning of each year… and leaving no one in the offices to cover sales! The world sadly does not stop in January.
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