As you all know, the economic climate of 2009 is a cold, cold winter indeed.\u00a0 And like wolves starved by the cold and hardship of the season, our suppliers have turned feral.<\/p>\n
When everyone’s sales slip due to the down economy, companies (and individual sales reps) are desperate to make their numbers.\u00a0 How are they doing it?\u00a0 By trying to jack up maintenance costs, in some cases by more than 100%!\u00a0 It’s way more than isolated incidents; all our maintenance renewals coming up are meeting with hugely inflated quotes.\u00a0 And not fly-by-night companies either, I don’t want to name names but let’s just say I am confident everyone out there has heard of all of them.<\/p>\n
So protect yourself.\u00a0 In your dealings with your supplier reps, start making it clear way ahead of time that your economic situation sucks too and you certainly expect that there’s a price freeze in place.\u00a0 Don’t put up with it either – they know they’re going to make plenty of money off all the goons they send quotes to who will just rubber-stamp it and send it on so they can return to ESPNZone (I’m looking at you, State of Texas).\u00a0 If you put up enough resistance they’ll go looking for easier pickings, just like those mean ol’ wolves do. \u00a0\u00a0 We had one outfit that wanted to jack up our maintenance cost by $125k a year, but luckily our IT director is a firm lady who has no problems with browbeating a sales rep until he cries.\u00a0 In the end, we let them have a 5% increase because we ended up feeling sorry for them.<\/p>\n
And have a backup plan.\u00a0 If they really do have you over a barrel, then you’re low on leverage – you can try offering reference calls, presenting at conferences, and other handy non-cash incentives to them.\u00a0 But when it comes down to it, you need to be able to walk away from them.\u00a0 And to do this you need to plan ahead.\u00a0 There are very few things that there’s only one of.\u00a0 Have multiple suppliers lined up, and have a plan to change hardware or software if you have to.\u00a0 Also look into open source, or third party support – even if it’s “not as good,” these days you have to decide how much good is worth how much money.<\/p>\n
Now don’t get me wrong, we like to partner with our suppliers and treat them friendly.\u00a0 Win-win and all that.\u00a0 But good fences build good neighbors, and there’s nothing friendly about showing up and saying\u00a0 “Hey, your operations will grind to a halt without our product, so stick ’em up and give me double this year!”<\/p>\n
Be advised, that gleam in Bob the Sales Rep’s eyes will be a little hungrier than usual these days, and he’s gotta eat one of God’s little forest creatures to live.\u00a0 Just make sure it’s not you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As you all know, the economic climate of 2009 is a cold, cold winter indeed.\u00a0 And like wolves starved by the cold and hardship of the season, our suppliers have turned feral. When everyone’s sales slip due to the down economy, companies (and individual sales reps) are desperate to make their numbers.\u00a0 How are they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[188],"tags":[209,210],"class_list":["post-166","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-featured","tag-supplier","tag-vendor"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pfI0c-2G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=166"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/166\/revisions\/191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=166"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=166"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.webadminblog.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=166"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}