Sometimes We Say ‘No’
Ashton founder and President Jim Millican is very fond of the saying that “you don’t have a strategy until you can say ‘no'”. At Ashton, that means that not every prospect is the right fit for us. From the sales side of things, that can sometimes be a difficult pill to swallow. We’re sales people- we are supposed to sell everything to everyone, right? I can’t say it’s been easy for us to come to terms with that mantra, but we have, and we’re better for it.
It Doesn’t Happen Often
The first time I said ‘no’ to a prospect was three years ago. I’d never said ‘no’ before (at least not at an introductory meeting), and there was no reason to expect that I would, anytime soon. However, when our ops manager Travis and I walked into a first meeting with a prospect (after a 50+ minute drive to their office), it only took me 15 minutes before I closed my notebook and said “nope.” They just weren’t the right fit for us. They used a free email solution for the sole reason that it was free. Their hardware hadn’t been updated in years, because they didn’t see the value in it, even though they admitted that their users were very inefficient.
As good salespeople, it’s up to us to educate others on the need for quality solutions. In this case, though, I knew that it would fall on deaf ears. When I closed my notebook so early in the discussion, Travis practically fell off of his chair. And suddenly, the prospect thought we were playing ‘hard to get’. We weren’t, but he practically begged us to work with him. In the end, we provided some ballpark numbers for managed IT services, network remediation, email migration, and new hardware… and never heard from them again. For once in my life, I was right.
Choosing a Provider Via Spreadsheet
That brings me to this week. Twice, we’ve been approached by companies looking to switch to a new managed services provider. Not surprisingly, both are companies with whom we’ve had past discussions, albeit it four years ago, in both cases. Both chose other providers based on price alone, and now they’ve come back with problems that could not be resolved, and complaints about poor service. We see this pretty regularly. The interesting thing about these two instances is that both companies provided us with a spreadsheet listing between 30 and 90 questions, with the request that we respond to each.
These questions range from the simple (‘when was your company founded?’ and ‘how many insurance firms do you support?’) to the technical (‘can you support our firewall?’ even though we have no idea what type of firewall they have) and the subjective (‘what components of active directory do you think are critical to support a stable IT environment?’). One even asks for pricing. These are all good questions, and we understand the need to compare answers when looking at multiple providers; We tell prospects on a regular basis that comparing ‘apples to apples’ when looking at multiple MSPs can be close to impossible. In both of these cases, the prospect is doing their best to put all providers on an even playing field.
On a Need to Know Basis
The problem, however, is the fact that a spreadsheet is an absolutely terrible way to choose a managed services provider, unless you’re shopping for nothing more than the lowest cost provider. One spreadsheet has already been filled out and returned (we were given a deadline), even though we know zero (zip, nada, nil) about what hardware is in place, how networking has been handled, what end user needs are, or what IT issues the company faces on a daily basis. They requested answers to these questions without being willing to share with us any of the insight that we truly need to provide proper pricing. And, they actually seemed rather offended by the fact that we had to answer “TBD” when they asked what our onboarding project would cost, or when hit with “What’s the cost of necessary hardware?” Unless we can provide specific pricing in advance, it seems we won’t be included in the proposal process.
Sometimes We’re Not the Right Fit
And that’s when I said ‘no’. Well, I didn’t flat out say it, but I did explain that we may not be the right fit for this company (company number two has also presented us with a formal RFP as well as a list of existing hardware and networking, and seem open to some fact finding). Sure, we know that we can’t manage any Linux instances that they have, and we know the cost of backing up all of their servers on a monthly basis (although some of their 15 servers may be candidates for consolidation), and while we have an idea as to ongoing monthly fees and a ballpark on the onboarding, we don’t have nearly enough information to provide specifics. I explained that, and also explained that any provider who was willing to give all of the numbers without having even seen the car, much less having looked under the hood, was a disaster waiting to happen.
Talk about changing the tires while the car heads down the road… Other providers will offer a number based on limited information, just to get the business. Once they get into the network, prices will invariably go up as more and more ‘surprises’ come to light. And that’s not a good experience for either the customer or the provider. So, why get into that situation in the first place?
So, yes, I did say ‘no’. We don’t do it on a regular basis, but every now and then it happens. Anheuser Busch used to promote the slogan “Know when to say when”. At Ashton, it’s “know when to say no”.
