How Buyers & Vendors Self-Sabotage - Community Responses

Hey Friends,

As part of our recent mini-series on the ways that both buyers and vendors in the smart buildings industry self-sabotage projects and hold us back from new tech adoption, we asked you, our community, to chime in with your own terms. And chime in you did!  ICYMI, here are the first rounds for Buyers and Vendors.

We are so grateful for all of the replies, LinkedIn comments, and other discussions that were had around these “dictionaries,” and thought we’d show our appreciation by doing a How Buyers & Vendors Self-Sabotage — Community Responses. This will (for now) be the last in our series, but we look forward to revisiting it as needed in the future. Since we started with vendors initially, this time we’ll discuss buyers first. May we all take these terms to heart, and find ways to not only stop our own self-sabotage, but have a bit more empathy for what our counterparts endure as well.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Response #1 - “Free-Sampling”

Our first response comes from Jeff Soplop, who thought this action from buyers deserved it’s own stand-alone term. Free-Sampling is where buyers take meetings and ask for demos from vendors, with no actual budget, strategy, or intention to ever move forward. While Floundering at least starts with intention and reasoning, Free-Sampling is merely when buyers want to be educated or look busy for their bosses.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Response #2 - “What-Nexting”

Sometimes, buyers self-sabotage much later in the process. While Pilot-Floundering prevents initial projects from ever getting off the ground, What-Nexting is where successful pilot programs go to die. Too often, buyers plan, develop, and even complete a project without any plans for larger deployments or determining what happens once the pilot program is over. The champion failed to involve stakeholders from the larger portfolio, and unforeseen obstacles arise when implementation stretches beyond the pilot.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Response #3 - “Infrastruggling”

This resonates with the teachings of the Nexus Lore whitepaper… Infrastruggling is when buyers focus on application layer solutions when their network, device, and data layer are broken or incomplete. Another silo is created with its own UIs, service plans, point naming, and communication protocols. A software application is only as good as the data it pulls from, and when that data is struggling, you’re Infrastruggling.

Buyer Self-Sabotage Response #4 - “Guarantee-Addicts”

Guarantee-Addicts are buyers who refuse to work with vendors without a full guarantee up-front, before putting any skin in the game. Synonymous with the long tale of late adopters, Guarantee-Addicts slow down innovation by their unwillingness to take any risk. The truth is buyers may need to pay a bit to see exactly what innovative systems are capable of, or at the very least be willing to risk-share (this is the way).

That wraps it up for our buyers! Now on to the vendors...

Vendor Self-Sabotage Response #1 - “ROI-ing”

This is one we heard over, and over, and over again. Shout out in particular to Brendan Robinson for his take on what seems to be one of the more popular ways vendors self-sabotage we initially missed — ROI-ing.

ROI-ing is when vendors over-inflate the value of their products, or imply it will add value in unseen ways, ultimately undermining their credibility and the direct value of what they’re trying to sell.

When vendors create complicated proposals with layers of real (or imagined) ROI, they ignore the need for simplicity in real estate investing. Buyers need concise PDFs, not long meetings, “consultative approaches,” endless email chains, or pages of content. Anything more than a crisp explanation of how your product can actually improve the lives and businesses of buyers will slow down, or completely sabotage, the process.

Vendor Self-Sabotage Response #2 - “Catch Me If You Can”

When vendors disappear immediately after a sale, they are playing the game of Catch Me If You Can. While consultative approaches may not be ideal in initial proposals, it can absolutely be advantageous for both parties once buyers are bought in. Not only does it help ensure success, it provides opportunities for up-selling down the line.

Vendor Self-Sabotage Response #3 - “Wizardry”

Our final community response comes from Joel Urban, who said it best:

“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” is spun so often by salespeople in our industry to hide the fact that the way the vendor delivers the feature/functionality is not the way they claim it to be. For example, saying that AI or ML is automatically doing something when in fact it is a person or team of people manually crunching data in a spreadsheet. Or, saying the software is plug-and-play when really it is one or two skilled integrators doing a bunch of manual effort to set up the integration.

Do you have any more to add to the list? Hit reply. We challenge you to speak with your colleagues about which self-sabotage methods may be slowing you down. Once again, thank you to everyone who sent in a response!

- The Nexus Labs Team

‍