How To Win Support & Influence Vendors
3/11/10
Written By Richard Milam
Dale Carnegie in his famous book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” posits that one of the great ways to win friends and influence is to use their name when you speak with them. He goes on to say that a person’s name is the sweetest sound in the world to them.
Although I’ll admit that the older I get the more times I need to hear a name before it is locked in short term memory, I have tried this many times and it really does work. It’s not so much manipulation as it is a confirmation to the person that you care enough to focus on them and learn to speak their name properly.
If you’ll allow me to extrapolate this to “friendships” between companies and their vendors, the sweetest sound to a vendor is a resounding endorsement. Consider the following…
While preparing to enjoy a sumptuous dinner hosted by Focus Technology Group (a highly regarded firm that is renowned for world class auditing analytic solutions) and some mutual clients, the following dialogue ensued once the people representing the two clients at our table became aware that I represented EnableSoft.
“We LOVE Foxtrot! We use it every day and couldn’t live without it.”, the tall well groomed young lady from a large regional Chicago financial institution gushed.
I smiled and replied, “That’s great! What sorts of things do you use it for?”
“What don’t we use it for would be a better question.” added her associate, an equally pleasant and articulate banker.
Not about to be left out, the manager from a Pennsylvania Bank seated across the table said, “You flew your plane up to Gettysburg when we bought the Foxtrot licenses, didn’t you? We also use it on a regular basis. Your support is the best of any company we deal with; we always get either a solution or an answer right away and your people are so knowledgeable.”
At this point, I’m looking at our host and blushing from the embarrassment of riches that I had just experienced in the way of affirmation of me and my firm. We talked about EnableSoft’s FoxtrotOne Internet and Windows scripting technology that enables everyday analysts and knowledge workers to scrape and populate web and Windows applications without programming and how that might be leveraged in their organization. I quickly attempted to steer the conversation back to something mutually interesting to our host company.
It was a frank and realistic discussion in that our clients shared a frustration or two including a long awaited enhancement to support right-click menus and the need for training as they have been using Foxtrot Suite so long that the old hands had been promoted and were training the newbies on an as needed basis. In Jeff Jarvis’s new book, “What Would Google Do”, he says your worst customer is your best friend because they will tell you what you need to do to make your company and offerings better. I agree that it is wise to pay attention when the customer speaks.
So why am I sharing this and why would a customer be interested or is this simply a back door way to show off? Well, let me explain. When I went back to the shop and shared this with our team, they lit up and were ready to walk on hot coals for all of our clients really, but these two clients in particular. Our marketing folks were jazzed about the enthusiastic references they were willing to provide and our development team moved their requested enhancements into the next development sprint.
That’s why resounding endorsements are so important, besides the fact that you want your best vendors to thrive and be there for you to continue to give you that great support.
Oh, and when you use someone’s name right away, it’s much easier to remember.
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“I regret that we didn’t try the Foxtrot Agile Tester before we spent significant financial and programming resources on two of the industry’s leading software testing packages. After brief training by EnableSoft our QA team was able to quickly automate our release testing in very short time without the programming staff’s involvement. Both the quality and ROI far exceeded our highest expectations.”
Ron Peri, CEO Radixx International
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