How to succeed with vendor partners?

It is impossible to succeed, in our increasingly Cloud + SaaS world, without working hand-in-glove with your vendor partners. Here are some tips that may help you become the favourite customer that all vendors love to work with!

1. Respect them : Treat vendor account teams with the same respect you would appreciate from your customers. Be responsive, professional and courteous. Please don't let the "Customer is king" cliché give you wrong idea and make your teams arrogant. This is particularly important if your company is doing well, at that time.

2. Think four years minimum : Plan any partnership for minimum four years. Similar to onboarding staff, it can take months before reaching sustained value. Quick wins on low hanging fruit is useful to generate initial excitement but be sure you have chosen well for the boring long stretch. Pick a vendor who is in it for the long game and make your expectations clear to them.

3. Use monthly average TCO for fair comparison : Get this right before selecting your vendor. Don't be enamoured by initial discounts alone, but what really matters long term, is total cost factoring in expected growth over multiple years, and then averaging by month. Do to hard yards with your finance business partner to model well, and your vendor sales team to get it right, to ensure there are no unpleasant surprises later. You also owe it to your successor to make sure that she/he is set up for success by you having thought through this.

4. Get the cost model aligned to expected growth : Think really hard on the licensing model . For example, for a Data Warehouse, if you do not expect a lot of data volume growth, but expect intense compute, choose an appropriate product. This is your job - not your vendor's. You cannot complain to them about unexpected cost due to great internal adoption! Work with the vendor to ensure that you structure the cost model to enable scaling comfortably.

5. Support and cheerlead your Account Manager's success: Similar to employees leaving, having vendor account managers change frequently is not great. Think about how you can help them in their career. Provide authentic and constructive feedback, be generous with your time for their prospective customer reference calls, and reasonable marketing support etc. Have their back. Don't put them under the bus every time there is an issue. Own up.

6. Train your team to work well with vendor support : Coach your teams to understand the reality that all software, irrespective of vendor, will run into bugs. Educate them on how it is critical to work constructively with support - right from how to write clear support tickets, being responsive to questions, jumping on screen-sharing sessions, providing context, all the way to having the courtesy to thank support when tickets get resolved.

7. Invest in training to use products correctly : Your vendor can give you the best technology but they cannot do a good job with it for you. Invest in training your teams to use the products well. As Jerry Seinfeld trained Kramer (a little too late) on how to use the latest in locking technology correctly, this is totally on you.

8. Invest in understanding the product roadmap : Engage with Product Engineering teams at your vendors to understand their roadmap. Technology changes dramatically. Having a solid understanding of features that are coming can save you a lot of wasted work in developing features that are coming out-of-the-box. When mutually beneficial, commit your engineering time to participate in previews, and provide valuable feedback.

9. Re-evaluate every three years and factor in exits : Three years into your four-year planning horizon, go back to the drawing board to re-evaluate the relationship. Be upfront with your vendors that this is how you operate - nobody likes surprises. Your company's needs change over time and there may be other vendors that may fit the need better. Assume it is Day 1 and decide if you want to extend or not. If you choose not to continue, it is completely fine. Please work with your vendor to phase things out smoothly over the fourth year and manage the change smoothly with your stakeholders.

10. Develop mutual trust : It is good to have a healthy level of scepticism, especially initially, but ultimately you have to develop strong mutual trust to get things done. You should be comfortable enough to be able to say no to non-relevant up-sell and cross-sell, and still maintain the relationship, and they would be comfortable enough to be honest with you on what are the true weaknesses of their product.

Bonus Tip : Life is too short not to have fun along the way as well. Invite them your parties and celebrations and join theirs!

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Photo by Tom Cleary on Unsplash