A Partial Cure for IT Vendor Cold Calls

IT professionals often use LinkedIn to express dissatisfaction with the number of unsolicited messages they receive from technology vendors. The complaints are justifiable. There are reportedly 1,200 cybersecurity vendors alone. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet solution here. Every company has a sales funnel to manage, even the one employing the IT professional. The temptation to simply shut off the noise is great, but the goal should be to cull the most useful signal. 

In several C-level roles, I got my fair share of incoming messages, but I’ve been in sales roles too. Earlier in my career, as an investment banker, I courted Treasurers, CFOs and CEOs. More recently, I call on executives across IT, Legal, Finance, and the businesses they support, to protect and create value from their data assets while complying with privacy regulations.  

Understand the Beast

It’s worth putting oneself in the vendors’ shoes. Any tech company worth their A-round is proud of its product. At the very least, they are convinced that there is an edge case that no one else can satisfy.  Not wanting to waste your time or that of an expensive direct sales resource, vendor sales managers try to be reasonably disciplined in targeting opportunities. 

There is self-respect involved. Sales people see their role as just as valuable a discipline as your own. There’s a lot of pressure to feed information into a CRM system to measure management’s ability to engage and convert its fair share of the addressable market. Livelihoods are at stake.  They will keep knocking until someone answers.

Unfortunately, too many vendors still employ outmoded sales management tactics, such as measuring reps on dials per day, rather than invest in data science that can lead to better targeting. Vendors that raise their analytical game will perform better and annoy fewer prospects.

Engage More, Ignore Less

At best, I can suggest only a partial cure for IT vendor cold calls and emails. In short, more communication and engagement rather than ignoring and deleting, or blocking and unsubscribing, is an upfront investment that can pay dividends.

The respect you show by responding to the first message generally gets reciprocated through the avoidance of repeated attempts. You can always block repeat offenders, and you have the CAN-SPAM Act to back you up. Vendors take those actions seriously.

There’s karma to all of this too. The US IT market may be worth $1.6 trillion in 2019, but the vendor/customer community can feel like a village. Both sides show up at the same conferences, and sometimes they even switch jerseys. Reputations can precede us all. Some of my favorite compliments are from vendors who tell me they appreciated that I always gave them a hearing, even though I never bought from them.

Use Specialty VARs to Modulate the Noise

One structural change can have a beneficial effect; not just in managing incoming communications, but also in improving your understanding and adoption of better processes and technologies.

IT vendors, usually by the time they have raised a few rounds of VC money, rely on a network of distributors and value-added resellers (VARs) to get their product to market. We have come a long way from the days when Michael Dell convinced a generation of buyers that middleman means markup, urging everyone to go direct. In fiscal 2019, over 50% of Dell Technologies' net revenue went through the channel. In many cases, today a customer can even get a better price through a VAR than by going direct.

Not all VARs are created equal. The largest play more of a fulfillment role, representing the full spectrum of software and hardware vendors, with strong relationships within customers’ procurement departments. Specialty VARs, on the other hand, focus on one or more sub-disciplines within IT, with technical and process depth that is more likely to create a trusted advisory relationship with customers who get involved early in the evaluation and selection process. 

Developing relationships with specialty VARs covering your core areas (e.g., infrastructure, security, communications, etc.) can create a critical filter between the customer and hundreds of vendors. These VARs become part of a broader mission with the customer that no single vendor can appreciate. They often orchestrate multiple technologies, along with process expertise, and enjoy customer touchpoints spanning vertically and horizontally within an organization. 

Most important, specialty VARs regularly engage in account mapping with the vendor community and can communicate your priorities for you, acting as a force multiplier. Like air traffic controllers, they can influence the flow of communication that otherwise would flow between customer and vendor direct sales. Informing vendors of your specialty VAR relationships can reduce the number of subsequent, unsolicited, incoming solicitations.

Similarly, revealing your reliance on a managed service provider can wave off scores of firewall, storage, SIEM and many other vendors from courting your business. 

Try Something Different

Patience can wear thin when one feels under constant siege from all the solicitations. Social media sites like LinkedIn can make what has always been a problem with sales people even worse. These tactics cannot keep every inside sales rep from asking if you’re going to RSA, but just putting a dent in this problem by trying something different can help. There are some great ideas to hear if you can eliminate some of the noise.