We hear from a lot of enterprise content buyers about what they don’t like about working with vendors or what “contracts from hell” look and feel like. Here are a few things that will annoy customers. Hint: this is not a good climate in which to be annoying.

• Forced bundling.
• Arbitrary price increases where no discernible value is added to the product.
• Having a near monopolistic position and invoking bullet number two with a take it or leave it stance.
• Having salespeople that don’t return phone calls and/or invoke both items 3 and 2 while making no bones about it and while not returning calls.
• Integrating products and brands by “name” after myriad acquisitions but leaving the back-office pieces, like separate contracts, usage reporting, invoicing, and customer relationship management, non-integrated with the customer having to pick up the pieces.
• Not being able to invoice in local currency, or defining users and user groups (for pricing purposes) by geographic or worse physical location. We even heard of one company that sends out separate invoices per user! Note: according to Tom Friedman the world is flat and the only companies that can’t integrate invoices these days are phone and cable companies. Everyone else needs to be in the 21st century.
• Attorneys that negotiate contracts who act and sound like frustrated prosecuting attorneys. Customers are not adversaries and behaving like a Rottweiler (a breed I happen to love by the way) is not a good idea.

It’s hard to believe some of this is going on in this day and age but truth be told, some of the largest companies are the biggest offenders and in this era of duopolies in almost every segment and sub-segment of the industry customers are going to start biting back. We’ve been saying that as prices increase, budgets decrease, and the top 2, 3 and 4 vendor positions get staked out, we’re going to be competing on different battlegrounds (think experience) and market share will be won or lost on how easy companies are to do business with, especially since the enterprises we are talking with are no longer willing to put up with duplication. It’s a luxury they can no longer afford even when multiple points of view are important. They’ll get the multiple points of view from other than the top 2 or 3 market share leaders (in duplicate or triplicate). Customers – please send along suggestions for “what does the ideal vendor and contracting and contract process look like.” As is often the case, people tend to talk more about what they don’t like vs. what they do like. So in the spirit of honey vs. vinegar – send along some honey and we’ll share your ideas!  Respond to this post, send an email, call, fax, or use a postage stamp. We’re all ears.

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