One of the biggest misnomers about negotiating with your vendors is that you should wait until end of quarter for ‘the best price’ – having been on all sides of the fence it doesn’t work for anyone. A few points:
- As a customer waiting until the end of quarter places risk on your ability to be commercially agile – you drive a persona of only being driven by dollars and therefore are predictable. This is an old tactic, and it doesn’t work on anyone under the age of 50 and who didn’t get their start selling photocopiers.
- End of quarter as a sales lead as a reseller or vendor sales lead is shit….doesn’t matter how good you are, the pressure from the next level up is big….so when you can sense a customer drilling you as a tactic you are less likely to help longer term.
- End users, resellers and vendors have all trained each other on a cycle that is driven around ONLY price, but all three moan about it ‘only being a money thing now’ or ‘its not about relationship anymore’
A current client we are working with asked us to scope a new platform for their storage, switching and long term support structure. Here’s how we engaged with the vendor:
- Spoke to the vendor, found out what their fiscal quarter dates were. We then told them we would be closing any deal with them at the START of their quarter. Sales people and Pre Sales staff getting to retire their quota at the start of a quarter and kick back for 2.5 months….the value of that is very high.
- We compared and contrasted their storage $ per GB against 3 public cloud vendors, their compute clusters against another vendor and delved into their support structures. Wrote up a concise list of our expectations and sent it across before our commercial discussions.
- Had a frank discussion and kept to our dates, times and resources and the vendor did as well.
Our client paid far less for the overall project because the vendor closed early in the quarter, our support inclusions increased for no monetary increase, our clients education on the technology is greater as we pushed for client technical education as well as over the shoulder implementation skills.
Easy – because people weren’t playing the EOQ BS game. Everyone won. The project has been a success. We’d love to hear from you if you need help with this or even a few minor pointers. Its second nature to us, but we’ve been playing the game for a long time…we just changed the game to be a very flat playing field 🙂
Whats been your experience? we’d love to hear from you.