What Are You Doing Right Now
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I mostly do understand what you are saying - but at the same time, is it not our responsibility to shop around for the best price?
I don't know, are you paid to be in IT or to be a shopper? Purchasing is a different job role. And one that IT people are not good at. But do you see the gear you buy as a commodity or as something that needs support? Most businesses need support and care from their VARs.
So....
If you only buy from places like Amazon and NewEgg, then yes, someone (not IT) should be shopping around for low prices.
If you buy from VARs (including CDW, Softmart, or resellers) then pretty much no, if you are shopping around you are undermining the relationship of the VAR and aren't thinking of this properly.
So help me think about this properly - VAR = Value Added Reseller - what value are they providing if I don't ever use them for suggestions on things to buy? I suppose I could use them to assemble the server instead of getting 100 tiny boxes mailed to me (remember I'm an SMB, I'm the one who will rack and stack my server).
It would be different if we were talking about consultants, or even MSPs, but in those cases, I would fully expect them to be the ones doing the price shopping and making sure we got the best deal we could.
In the SMB there rarely is a purchasing department (at least in my experience), so yes, it's my job too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Why does a business relationship with a vendor at CDW, SoftMart, etc work any differently?
Because..... relationship.
Softmart is our partner. They know our needs, we know their needs. We work together. We are a team. They provide sales support, we do the technical stuff. They aren't a store, they are a VAR with lots of resources of all types. They have licensing people, vendor reps, all kinds of things.
Wait - why or rather how am I using the licensing people, etc at Softmart - those are sales people trying to sell me something - I can't trust them to not over sell me. That's what I pay NTG to tell me how much to order of what, and then I tell Softmart to order exactly that.
If you're now telling me that NTG uses the licensing people at Softmart to help them decide what customers need, I see that as hypocritical.
Of course not saying you are being so - just looking for an explanation. -
If we have to reach out to Softmart on anything it's more for the clarification on how licensing works or what's available for a certain package. Things change so often that it's difficult to keep up with all the little details sometimes.
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Softmart also has a department that helps a customer if they get audited on software etc. (MS specifically). So we use them as a resource if needed.
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@dafyre said:
No argument there. But if we have a bad sales process, we won't be doing business with the company that the sales rep works for.
Two problems here...
- Why punish the company for the sales person's actions?
- Unless you didn't need the sales person, how would you know that the process was bad?
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@Dashrender said:
So help me think about this properly - VAR = Value Added Reseller - what value are they providing if I don't ever use them for suggestions on things to buy?
It's value add to the sale, not to the sales process.
There are many values. Big ones include technical knowledge of the products themselves. They know, we hope, what parts work together, what feature codes are needed to get what you intend, access to resources, etc. NTG signs up as a VAR Partner with a lot of vendors not to sell anything but because it provides us access to their technical resources that only VARs can get. We don't care where you buy Netgear, we've never sold a single unit, but we have inside access to technical support to help our customers. We get more manuals, access to Netgear people, roadmap insight and more that Best Buy can't help with.
Then there are logistics. I need a server in two hours. Softmart can do that. Amazon cannot. I need a view into the entire US supply chain and knowledge of where parts are, how long they take to get where, etc. Our VARs do this for us. Logistical management is a big thing.
It's a combination of logistical, competitive and technical knowledge about the products that they sell as well as upgraded options, features and support from the primary vendors. Which makes them valuable, but useless for choosing what we need from an IT perspective but great once the choice is made.
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@Dashrender said:
In the SMB there rarely is a purchasing department (at least in my experience), so yes, it's my job too.
That's something you need to decide if it is or isn't part of your job. It has rarely been part of mine in the SMB or in the enterprise. I've been in big for an SMB but not THAT big companies (over 1K employees but not huge) that had whole purchasing departments just to make sure pricing, POs and such were good and went through smoothly. Really any company of a few hundred people should likely have one, they pay for themselves quickly. High cost, highly skilled IT staff spending time shopping on Amazon is a pretty big waste of resources.
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@Dashrender said:
It would be different if we were talking about consultants, or even MSPs, but in those cases, I would fully expect them to be the ones doing the price shopping and making sure we got the best deal we could.
Depends if that is something that you hire them to do or not. As consultants, we often have the customers do their own shopping because they have existing relationships that we don't want to interfere with or we don't want to give the impression that we are making money on the sale directly or indirectly. Having customers shop and buy directly helps to avoid that as they never see the money or the relationship passing through our hands. Varies by customer, some wish that we were a VAR and want it all on one bill. Some, like you, do it "sideband" with our existing partner Softmart who works as the VAR but has "hooks" to us to let us function in a VAR-like role with visibility into logistics and supplychain for our customers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
So help me think about this properly - VAR = Value Added Reseller - what value are they providing if I don't ever use them for suggestions on things to buy?
It's value add to the sale, not to the sales process.
There are many values. Big ones include technical knowledge of the products themselves. They know, we hope, what parts work together, what feature codes are needed to get what you intend, access to resources, etc.
...It's a combination of logistical, competitive and technical knowledge about the products that they sell as well as upgraded options, features and support from the primary vendors. Which makes them valuable, but useless for choosing what we need from an IT perspective but great once the choice is made.
This seems like a muddying of the water again - you're willing to listen to these resellers about what parts work together - that demands a level of trust that I thought you were against (and one I've found not to be overly true, at least with CDW). You are allowing them to change your configuration once you are taking advice from them on what parts work together.
Here's an example - I need a RAID card that supports RAID XYZ with 8 GB cache. If I don't tell the reseller the exact card I want (through my research) why should I trust them to sell me the least expensive card that gives me what I need instead of the most expensive?
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@Dashrender said:
Wait - why or rather how am I using the licensing people, etc at Softmart - those are sales people trying to sell me something - I can't trust them to not over sell me.
You would use them if you called Shannon and asked them for licensing information. They are available to you as a customer. The way to use them properly would be to figure out your licensing on your own and then have them look it over to verify. Because of the nature of licensing, this isn't like sales because it is questions of legal liability and requirements and not about what "should" be used, legally they cannot try to push you to buy more than you need.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
It would be different if we were talking about consultants, or even MSPs, but in those cases, I would fully expect them to be the ones doing the price shopping and making sure we got the best deal we could.
Depends if that is something that you hire them to do or not. As consultants, ...
You're right, it does depend on what I hire them for.
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@Dashrender said:
This seems like a muddying of the water again - you're willing to listen to these resellers about what parts work together - that demands a level of trust that I thought you were against (and one I've found not to be overly true, at least with CDW). You are allowing them to change your configuration once you are taking advice from them on what parts work together.
Remember, I DO trust them. I've never not trusted them. Maybe not CDW, I don't work with them. But I trust our partners like CDW that I do work with. Softmart, in our example, or Dell directly or xByte, etc. They test parts, know which parts are certified, etc. This is what I am very much FOR.
I keep saying that I trust sales people and feel that they are a critical part of the process. But for doing things like this, not for doing the IT work instead of the IT people, that's what consultants are for.
Let's use a car example.
I know I need transportation. I need to get to work every day. So I go to a transportation consultant. That person tells me I need to drive as there is no bus where I need to go and I'd have to walk eight miles a day and the weather is often bad. So, I need a car. He looks at my needs and determines that a Ford Focus is right for me. Right safety, cost, maintainability, etc.
Now I know what car to buy. Time to go talk to the salesman.
I go to my Ford dealer. The salesman let's me test drive the Focus and asks me what options that I want. I tell him the things I want and he tells me which packages are available that have those options. I say I want a blue one. He checks inventory and tells me what blue ones are available versus which ones have the packages that I want. I select some special wheels. he tells me that those don't fit my car but shows me similar ones that they have that will fit my car. he provides information as to delivery date.
The consultant provide the macro details going from business need or goal down to the design. The VAR provides the final tweaking inside of the solution set for details specific to the products in question.
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@Dashrender said:
Here's an example - I need a RAID card that supports RAID XYZ with 8 GB cache. If I don't tell the reseller the exact card I want (through my research) why should I trust them to sell me the least expensive card that gives me what I need instead of the most expensive?
I'm sure we could find examples all day that go in different directions but here is my take on this specific one...
A RAID card is a non-trivial component and you need to consider the full field of options (which is not very big.) You want to make sure that you have a good feel that nothing is being missed. Now, in reality, if you don't know which card to buy chances are you need a consultant for more than just deciding which card, but that is another issue. But you need a product agnostic viewpoint. Once the exact or "essentially" exact card is selected by the IT people (you and/or the consultant) then you would use the sales person to determine the price of the card. If you are okay with multiple cards, you can ask for a price on several but this is not something you would typically do with RAID cards, you need the right one not "any" one. not just what is on sale.
So this is not something you would trust to a reseller, especially because it is unlikely that the reseller carries all reasonable options.
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@dafyre said:
Right. This is why doing your own research is necessary. After you have been present with options from a sales rep. Especially on software. "We need somee Image editing software." Bam! Quote for Photoshop. Further research reveals Gimp. "What about Gimp?" "Oh, hey, this will do most of what we need, let's not buy Photoshop, yet."
That works in some cases. But in an example where it does work, like this one, where does the sales person help? You could have a Google result leading you to Photoshop AND GIMP faster than you could dial a sales person on the phone or send an email. That the sales person can tell you the name of a photo editing application isn't really useful. Basically you are just having them Google a product name for you. If you know enough to know you need image editing, the sales person is already just "in the way." But by using them like this not only are you wasting your time but theirs as well which won't lead to the best long term relationship.
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tl;dr
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It's 11.30pm here, 28C and humid. Yuck.
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@dafyre said:
DAY 4
- All vendors see similar margin ratios. This is a well known issue. No matter how many vendors you talk to they will always push SAN-based IPODs. The process of asking vendors for IT advice is what created the IPOD in the first place as it is the cheapest way to sell a SAN which has the highest margins. They all did it and millions of companies that were doing exactly this process fell victim to this design because it is the natural result of combining sales people giving advice, no IT checks and balances and the nature of storage margins. It is also what pushed RAID 5, all based on sales margins.
I don't argue that this is generally the case. We saw this happen when we were trying to purchase our storage setup. The question that we (the IT Team) kept coming back to "What happens if SAN 1 fails?" We asked the storage vendors we were speaking to about this, and two of them were like "you replicate from SAN1 to SAN2"... We liked the HP guys because they were the first one that told us that theirs was an active/passive cluster. No down time if SAN1 fails because SAN2 would automatically take over with no down time... Sadly, we did have to test this scenario several times, and (not so sadly) it worked beautifully.
That part is great. But where the issue comes in is that no one in the chain will ever step back and say "what about not having the SAN at all?" SAN is great in the right use cases, so maybe it was right here. But as everyone in the chain was paid by selling SANs, they answers were going to always be based around the assumption that a SAN was going to be purchased.
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@dafyre said:
This is why you ask for options, not promotions. Granted, it should be expected that you the get high margin promotions first -- after all the sales rep needs to eat too. But those can be easily tossed aside as outside of your budget range or not the product you are looking for after you do your own research.
Doesn't work that way, though. The promotions are to them, not to you. They get special kickbacks for pushing certain products. That's why one day the VAR will be all about Watchguard firewalls and the next day all about SonicWall. If you are just requesting a price, you don't need the sales person. If you are asking for anything more than a price, you are being guided by the promotions but will never be told about them.
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Have a good day people....
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