Date Night…

Warning, this post may contain distasteful and disturbing imagery!!

Like any relationship, the relationship between storage customer and storage vendor can go a bit stale, sometimes a bit awry. Often it's the same old thing; you bore me, you've got nothing to offer which I haven't seen before, you don't satisfy me any more, I've changed, you've not changed and the result is often, I want to see other people.

I hear this on a fairly regular basis from my colleagues in the storage world but often the root cause is simply not communicating properly and clearly. Often I'll hear a colleague moaning that their current array can't do the latest whizz-bang thing but often this simply isn't true. What they have actually is heard from the new exciting partner that their old partner can't do this and they believe them. However, if they bothered to talk to their old partner, they would find that either the feature is available now or firmly on the road-map.

Now I'm not saying that people should not change vendors but don't do it based on lack of information.

And vendors, don't take your customers for granted; spend time listening to them and finding out what other products they are interested in. Don't rubbish those products, don't rubbish the competitor; your customer is looking elsewhere because they have a genuine need that they feel you can't meet.

Treat every customer meeting like your first meeting and make sure that the customer feels valued. Too often I've seen account managers mess up because they took the customer for granted or because a customer has stopped buying, they take their eye off the ball. And the next thing they know, they are history.

So even if you've a long established relationship, try and arrange a date night once in whilst!  Keep those lines of communication open..