Customer Validation

I was chatting with a customer the other day and they were explaining to me the difference between working with us and their product vendor… this was really exciting for me to actually hear a customer’s perspective!

In her opinion, she felt that the vendor’s team came in with a mandate of implementing the product within certain boundaries. Obviously, one of them was price and the other of course was time. While you would think that these were reasonable constraints, they can only be reasonable when they are realistic and contemplate the client’s individual business and its peculiarities.

What happened in this case is that the vendor’s professional services team did not focus on what the business needed and rather they focused on getting what they thought the client needed (based on their experience of course) and basically drove the implementation that way. While this is a great way to get a product delivered on time and on budget, it rarely delivers the value and ROI that the client was looking for.

This is a common theme that we see in the industry… some very capable and knowledgeable consultants are forced to implement the product under very tight time-lines and as a result, some of the tasks perceived as lower value are either eliminated or are not completed as thoroughly as possible. We’ve even written about this in our White Paper.

We’ve always taken the position of working closer with our clients and focusing more on their business than on the technology so to hear on of our customers tell us we were on the right path was a nice reassurance. I’m very proud of our team and happy that our clients are seeing value in our work.