What are some vendor engagement tips that can help drive innovation?
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It's always funny to see one of those senior sales people stand there and sweat when you start drilling into the technical questions that you know they can’t answer. They should have prepared better to know their own product.
They're basically relationship managers.
When it comes to vendors of technology, you have to manage those relationships carefully, especially if you're dealing with procurement policies, etc., in your organization. But vendors can take you into the future. As a CIO for a number of organizations, I would always have some of our best vendors take us on a journey to show us where they’re investing their money, what their R&D looks like, and what the next big thing that they’re working on will be — whether that’s software, middleware layer, security systems, infrastructure or virtualization.
It was a great tool that gave me continuous education on the vendor's dime. It also gave me insight into whether they would be a good partner for years to come because I’d know if they were investing in, developing and enhancing technologies that would lead them in the right direction. It gave me a lot of confidence when I went to negotiate that next contract.
It's partners and commodities — you want to find vendors that you can partner with, that have a direction and a vision that you can subscribe to.
I'm not enamored with meeting vendors, but the ones that I do like are those that are in the cheap seats around the outside of the arena at a physical conference. They're the emerging vendors, and they’re creative. They’re willing to work with you because they are looking for clever solutions, so you can partner with them to try cool things.
Vendors often want to get you to their executive briefing center to give you insight into their view of industry trends, their product roadmap, etc. Typically, they’ll have a handful of people that make the same presentation, 10K times a year — it's very slick. Ironically, the people that are making the presentation usually have limited operational responsibilities; they don't really know what they're talking about, but they have a slick presentation.
When I worked at BMC, some of our more enlightened Fortune 300 companies would almost designate the people they wanted to hear from when they visited us in Houston. They’d say, "If you can't get me the CPO, the head of customer success and two other people, including the finance person, I'm not bringing my team down there. I want to hear from the horse's mouth, and I want to be able to ask my questions," etc. When people are trying to sell, they will move mountains to make something like that happen. But once they have you as a customer, they'll just tell you, "They're busy and I'm not sure I can get those folks to come out."