Last month we talked about our “No Salesman” policy and how it was great for our customers in that they got “undiluted advice direct from experts who give their advice directly from their qualification and experience”
This needs further exploration because it’s at the heart of the difference between Professional IT and Reseller IT, and between IT success and failure.
The “Yes test” is this – when your IT provider says “Yes it can be done” is that assurance coming from real qualifications and hands on experience or is it from cargo cult guesswork, inane features/benefits matching, or worse.
Reseller IT will appoint a non-technical account manager that is courteous and fun to get along with. Your Reseller IT account manager will know and take you to some great cafes for some great coffee. If you were to read their web bio you would know about their golf handicap, but not about any tangible IT experience and expertise.
But you if chose your primary IT provider because you needed IT advice and expertise and the primary contact has none – that’s not right. Reseller IT has technical expertise, but you will only see it when the account manager is building a deal. The account manager will sell you IT expertise, along with a bundle of other products – deal by deal.
When you ask the account manager, your primary contact point, a question of the form:
“Can this be done?” (This being a technical question that requires expertise and experience to answer)
And you hear back
“Yes”
You would hope that meant the following:
“Yes, (because I know so)”
The problem is that without expertise and experience “Yes” can only be one of the following:
“Yes, (I guess so. I’ve seen it done once somewhere else and I’d guess you are the same)”
“Yes, (” I hope so. You can do amazing things with IT)”
“Yes, (”but not right now, but we should be able to get it together by the time you find out)”
“Yes, (”but not right now, and it will be too late when you find out)”
“Yes, (”actually no, but everybody knows that IT doesn’t always work out)”
These five answers all represent failures of the ‘yes’ test.
Of course, the account manager could bring a technical resource to every meeting but this doesn’t happen because the account manager is supposed to sell the technical resource on to you.
The account manager could, in this situation, say “No, I don’t know”. This happens rarely because it begs the obvious question – “If you, Mr Account manager, have little to no expertise and experience in IT to share, then why am I talking to you?”
Most of these reseller account managers are commissioned on sales and therefore incentivised to fail the Yes Test.
I have been in this situation myself as part of our vendor management service and I have asked this question. “When you say it can be done, how do you actually know?”
What I typically get back is a memorised features/benefits list of a particular product but no actual understanding of the technology. I have been looking for a new car this week, and from the features/benefits of all of them, I could assume that I could drive to Australia. Thirty years of driving experience tells me this is nonsense, but you do not have this luxury with IT. More often than not the most important decisions are for technologies that you may have never purchased before. That’s when you want decades of IT experience advising you from the get go.
So next time you meet your account manager you may wonder what actual IT experience they have? What servers have they built? Do they know how email actually works?
Then ask yourself what sort of organisation you want as a primary IT provider.
Do you want an organisation that sees every interaction with you as a deal where they will grant you access to IT expertise or not depending on how the deal works out? Or do you want an IT provider that leads with IT expertise from the get go, where the only ‘deal’ going on is when you first choose them and from then on the mutual goal is great IT through knowledge and experience?
LANcom’s customers know what the latter is like.
The LANcom button is an exciting new service that will allow our customers to be only three clicks away from knowing everything they could want to know about their IT.
LANcom is getting a brand new look! We have decided to update our current logo and branding to better match some exciting new services will soon be releasing.