Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

Every now and then I get that tap on the shoulder, someone wants to chat with me in a dark corner and ask if I am about to offend people with what I say, think, believe and do.

You see, it is incomprehensible to some that a person will speak honestly and firmly about a sensitive subject that all traditional marketing and PR training has told you to avoid. In every organization there exists a list of items that are not for discussion, not for disclosure, that should never be admitted or commented on. Customer facing staffers are trained to avoid discussion of those items, to manage the conversation, to steer it in a way and whenever something potentially sensitive comes up to just nod and “thank you for your feedback, I will escalate it to the person in charge which just so happens to live in the castle with the Lochness monster.”

This is the norm of the services industry, professional as well as vocational. Your cell phone company will give you the same runaround that your office cleaning crew supervisor will.

Somewhere along the way people just chose to make “courteous” a synonym for patronizing and deceitful. For the dictionary experts out there – it’s not.

So why do folks in this business find it so important to base their approach on the exact same path of least resistance? Because all their gurus are doing it, and all their suppliers are doing it too.

“Oh, you just started your business and don’t have any customers and you’re at this conference instead of back at home working? Oh, right, because you wanted to get some fresh air and exchange ideas instead of trying to build business.

Well, that is fantastic. That’s a GREAT idea. You know what else is a great idea? This $20,000 management tool. Listen, as you grow you need a solid management foundation and this will save you money!”

Substitute any product, service, solution up there, it’s always the same. Four step process to closing business with IT professionals:

1. Listen to the war story at full attention.
2. Congratulate them on their opinion, even reinforce.
3. Ask about their problems.
4. Explain how your product will solve all their problems, close.

The faster you can get them into the debt up to their eyeballs you can’t really be held accountable for your solution sucking and not living up to the promise because they owe you money.

This, believe it or not is the standard operating procedure that is actually very well received and respected!

So suffice to say I get a little miffed when someone wants to discuss my approach of not lying straight into peoples faces and instead telling them what they don’t want to hear.

It’s not my fault that you’re an SPF, it’s your problem that you aren’t building a business.

I have absolutely no problem saying that. I base it on working with thousands of IT solution providers and hearing every sob story and every wild IT solution dream scheme ever imagined. I work with some damn successful people too, and I try to offer some of that wisdom on this blog. It may not be a pleasant reading material for 99 out of 100 people, but that 1 guy may still have a shot.

I’m all about that 1%. Let’s be honest, business is tough. Management is tough. Marketing is tough, even when you have a ton of money. Business is not easy. You have to surround yourself with the people that will keep you on your toes and keep on adjusting you as you go along.

And now we come to the actual jist of this blog post: when you can talk openly you will from time to time get smacked back in your mouth and people will have no fear to reach out and talk to you. You get to learn, you get to grow, you get to see things coming from a mile away instead of waking up from your dream one day in the middle of the sea of reality. Is being brutally honest bad for business because it will discourage people from working with the crazy man or woman? No. Because you may turn off some, but you will open up discussions with thousands more and actually stand out in a sea of drones that do the exact same thing you do. Call it leadership, call it insanity, but give it a shot. If you keep on going to networking events and never make a buck from anything or anyone you meet there it’s a good indication that the best practices drivel you read isn’t paying off for you.

Maybe I’m all wrong on all of this, but least you’ll be able to sleep at night.

I’m going to try something new. I am going to write an eloquent post, in much the same way that I run my business and project my values through it.

There is a lot of discussion again about Dell being the fire-breathing dragon setting the lives and careers of small business professionals on fire and burning down the “channel bridge” they so often talk about building.

For those of you not familiar with this business allow me to sum it up for you:

Dell is a computer manufacturer whose motto is to go direct and compete in a market with tight margins and plenty of substitutes. Small business IT consultants are by nature middlemen that profit from service and product markups along with the overall solution design and deployment.

Both crowds are competing for the direct relationship with the customer because in the entire equation that is the most profitable variable. It is all about the customer.

Dell wins when they are able to sell their entire solution stack to the customer. Small business IT consultants win when they can sell their preferred solution stack to the customer, either because it fits better or earns them bigger margins.

Both pretend to want to do business with each other but neither is willing to give up their ground of owning that direct financial relationship with the customer.

So they lie to one another. Dell lies to the partner community by telling everyone they are very focused on the channel, that the entire company history and culture of “going direct” is going to flip on its back for a handful of SMB IT consultants. SMB IT consultants in return go back to the villified vendor for their computer equipment because they are the cheaper and the easiest of the computer manufacturers to purchase from due to their direct nature and service delivery.

The two coexist when its convenient and fight when nobody is watching.

So why is it a surprise to some that Dell is not a channel friendly company, and why is it a surprise to Dell that its channel partners are not feeling the love from their partners as it offers one critical SMB IT Consultant service after another? Onsite delivery, onsite repairs, proactive managed services, cloud services, etc?

Why is everyone so surprised that people in business talk from both sides of their mouth?

Because in business the only thing that matters is money and where you can make more of it. Wise business people take Dell at its face value, understand the number of the beast, understand the conflict and find a profitable way to work around it. Others, for whatever self-deprecating reason, choose to think they can change the status quo that has been around for over a decade in a very profitable way.

SMB IT consultants like to talk about ethics, about the importance of staying small, about the importance of local commerce and doing business within your community but I can tell you that statistically speaking SMB IT Consultants would rather do business with anyone but one of their own. I had never set out to build OWN by contributing to the community, I did so because I wanted to help build on a movement that helped OWN break through and grow by learning from peers. All the while I was writing Vladville guides, video blogging, SBS Show, I got a lot of atta-boy but in equal measure I got a lot of recommendations not to do what I do for free. I was messing up the commercial life of selling advice to the SMB IT community. I didn’t stop. Want to know what finally made me quit?

“Several hundred people, by my best account, would call me having heard of our great products and services and instead of giving me the business they said: “I love what you do for the community, but business is business.” That’s life I suppose, and I just helped train and promote the very people that took their money and gave it to my competitors.”

SMB IT consultants chose to run their business without emotion or gratitude.

There are no hard feelings over that here, OWN has made a lot of friends, I have made a lot of personal friends and despite or maybe in spite of all that I chose that we were going to run a professional business no matter what.

Dell chose the same. They go direct.

Words are just words, marketing and empty promises don’t generate revenue or pay salaries or grow businesses. They just keep gullible going for a little while longer, always falling back to the culture of the company.

If we all could admit to ourselves what our strengths and competencies are and focused on them instead of portraying what we wish we could be, we’d all be a lot better off. If we could focus on improving ourselves instead of criticizing those that don’t appear to be what their marketing implies that would be even better.