How do you work with vendors? How should vendors pitch you to get noticed?

A mentor in my formative years pointed out to me that customers give us their money, it is our job to earn it. There should never be an imperative upon the customer to force us to perform as they are paying us to perform, or to have need to supervise us to do what we told them we are best at. By the very same principle, I am the customer of the vendor. Is there any reason the same should not apply?

My team chooses vendors based not only upon their ability to perform and deliver according to the needs of the given project, but also upon their buy-in to our paradigm set, and their desire to be a part of a much larger, customer value added team and interact with others as such. Our loyalty to the vendor extends exactly as far as their continued diligence in this regard, and their integrity in maintaining the intent of our contracts.

As an aside, there is an imperative placed upon my team. We will not spend our time or money to get someone to do what we are already paying them to do. However, neither will we ever waste the time and money of our vendors by our own unpreparedness or lack of planning. The best and highest value comes from bilateral consideration.

As to the other important piece of your question, Matt; successful vendors MUST know something about my company and, if they have done their due diligence, they will pitch how they will bring value to my customer and interact with my extended team framework. The singular focus of all my companies is a simple, easy, enjoyable customer experience.

Together, let's put the fun back into work!
Belldon Colme
belldoncolme@gmail.com

My view of dealing with vendors is based on what I am looking for. While some items are pretty easy to describe and compare, others are much more subtle and require a much closer look at who is offering what. My approach, when I was selecting and recommending these more subtle elements, has been to:

first, create a functional list of what I am facing and what I want to address with help from a vendor;

second, issue a "request for information" (RFI) to vendors who publicly offer what appear to be solutions to my challenges. I do this instead of a RFP or RFQ because asking vendors to tell me what they offer without triggering their bidding process often uncovers things about them that will be effectively masked by the formal sales process.

Third, evaluate the responses and call the best in to tell me how they will solve my problems (or parts of my problems) with their offering. This, in a RFI context, often brings the vendor's technical guys in to talk with me, leaving the sales guys behind (or at the back of the room) so I can really evaluate what they have. I much prefer to hear more how a vendor will address my list of challenges and less about what he does best (which may not be relevant to my problems.)

Finally, evaluate these sessions and responses and, if one looks good, ask for priciing and a draft contract based on my functional list. This allows me to ask for at least some guarantee that a vendor's product will do what I need. Then, based on these more formal responses, I can pick a vendor and move forward.

Of course it isn't all that neat but I have seen it work in massive projects. I wrote an article about the technique in 2001: (http://www.ecmconnection.com/article.mvc/Navigating-The-Content-Management-Ju...)