How Buyers Self-Sabotage

Hey Friends,

Happy Halloween Eve!

As a vendor, there’s nothing more spooky than wasting time trying to support a buyer who can’t get out of their own way. Despite hours of discovery to understand their unique problem and craft a well-thought-out solution that you know will help them achieve their goals, progress stalls.

In the Buyer<>Vendor Symposiums at NexusCon, we discussed the tricky relationship between vendors and buyers as an obstacle to quicker technology adoption. In the closing keynote, James shared how both vendors and buyers have their ways of self-sabotaging what could otherwise be the next successful project.

Given our role as community builders at the nexus of buyers and sellers, we thought it would be useful (and fun!) to coin terms around the vendor and buyer self-sabotaging holding us back. In this mini-series, we will propose some terms for how vendors and buyers self-sabotage new tech adoption within smart buildings. If you missed last week on how vendors self-sabotage, we encourage you to read it here.

We received many emails from buyers enjoying the vendor roasting. Today, it’s time to turn the tables. Buyers, it’s your turn for an intervention.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Method #1 — “Lip-Zipping”

Real estate owners work hard to protect their reputations, maintain consistent branding, and comply with every rule and regulation. This is vital for managing risk, but it can have the negative side effect of creating a culture where the default is that information can never be shared. Lip-Zipping is when buyers have put non-disclosure over everything to the point that no one can help them with their goals and they are unable to share their stories with other buyers with similar goals.

When buyers are Lip-Zipping, they won’t tell anyone about their smart building successes or failures. They operate with a skepticism that every vendor is out to get them and therefore refuse to give vendors the information they need to provide solutions. They’ll often over-inflate their progress and act like they have it all figured out. Lip-Zipping buyers often build a brand that indicates care and compassion for the environment, but ironically, their unwillingness to share and collaborate stifles the industry from making real progress.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Method #2 — “Floundering”

The new boss launches a brand new initiative to grade the facilities management team based on short-term cost savings. The facilities team defers equipment maintenance to achieve the goal, inevitably leading to a failing infrastructure years later. Misaligned incentives like this are a classic symptom of Floundering.

Floundering occurs when the initial purpose and direction for implementing smart building technology becomes diluted or lost over time due to structural and cultural barriers. These organizations often suffer from a revolving door of leadership and a failure to establish a cohesive plan for more than a couple of months.  

Floundering organizations may have started with a smart buildings champion but failed to replace the role over time, leaving an orphaned smart buildings program without a strategy. When a company is Floundering, even the projects that start to gain momentum are just waiting to find internal resistance, as one “no” becomes more powerful than a roomful of “yes.”

Floundering also occurs when there is a lack of standards, infrastructure, and data governance to enable new technology. For vendors, it can be impossible to find the champion in a Floundering buyer organization because no one knows who can make the final decision.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Method #3 — “Pilot-Floundering”

This is a special type of Floundering, where buyers’ new technology deployments often end up in pilot purgatory.  

Throughout the NexusCon Buyer<>Vendor Symposium, the definition and use case for a pilot project was a hot topic. Pilot projects can be a great idea because they allow you to test your assumptions and compare vendors to each other directly, and therefore can really reduce the risk of a project before you spend a lot of money and time on design and contracts for scaling the technology up.

However, many vendors and even smart building champions have the scars of Pilot-Floundering. You do the project, and the vendor usually goes over the top to impress the owner and does a bunch of stuff that they wouldn't normally do. In the end, what happens? Nothing.  

Pilot-Floundering starts with a lack of defined assumptions and success criteria. The buyer fails to agree on the validation points and what would happen if the pilot proved those validation points true. So even if the project goes perfectly, the lessons get lost because the next step wasn’t clear.

With no consensus on the pilot's results, the Pilot-Floundering cycle restarts, and a new idea emerges. The irony with Pilot-Floundering is that sticking with a decision (even the wrong one) can be more affordable than years of indecision.

What do you think of our Self-Sabotage Dictionary?

Did we capture these buyer self-sabotage methods accurately? Have another one to add? Will you bring these new terms into your organization’s vocabulary? Hit reply here to let us know.

Let’s develop the self-sabotage dictionary together to put language to the obstacles slowing down our industry.

— The Nexus Labs Team

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