The hidden cost of inadequate reference checking
Miles Feinberg
Most businesses think they can run IT vendor selection internally. But the reference checks they skip or rush through quietly cost 20-30% more over the contract life. Here's what a proper one looks like.
What most reference checks actually look like
The vendor hands you three names. You call them. They say the vendor is great. You move on. This is the pattern we see in roughly 80% of internal vendor selections, and it tells you almost nothing useful.
The problem isn't that reference checks happen too rarely. It's that when they do happen, they're structured to produce the answer the vendor already wants you to hear. You're talking to curated, pre-screened clients who have every reason to be enthusiastic and no incentive to tell you where the cracks are.
What you're not hearing
A proper reference check surfaces the things that matter after you've signed. These are the questions that actually separate a good vendor from a polished sales pitch:
- What happened during your worst incident in the last 12 months, and how did they handle it?
- Have you ever had a billing dispute or surprise charge? How was it resolved?
- What's the staff turnover been on your account?
- If you were starting over, what would you negotiate differently?
- What would you change about this vendor if you could?
Notice the pattern. These aren't yes-or-no questions. They force the reference to describe a real situation, not give a testimonial. And the last one is the most revealing, because even happy clients will tell you something.
The gap that costs you
When reference checks are this shallow, you end up discovering the hard truths after signing: slow incident response, high technician turnover, surprise fees buried in change orders, and SLAs that look fine on paper but have broad exclusions in practice.
By then, you're locked into a contract with early termination penalties, data portability restrictions, and months of operational friction ahead of you. According to Gartner, roughly 60% of mid-market IT vendor relationships get renegotiated or terminated within 18 months. A lot of that traces back to a 20-minute reference call that didn't ask the right questions.
What a defensible reference check requires
The gap between a useful reference check and a rubber-stamp one isn't complicated. It takes:
- Independent references. Not just the three names the vendor provides. You need to find clients in your industry, at your scale, who weren't hand-picked.
- Situation-based questions. The kind that produce stories, not soundbites.
- Cross-referencing. Checking what the reference says against what the vendor claimed in their proposal. When they don't line up, that's where the risk lives.
It's not exotic work. It's just detailed, and most internal teams run vendor selections infrequently enough that they haven't built the process or the muscle for it.
The takeaway
The cost of a bad reference check isn't the time it takes to make a few more calls. It's the 18 months of discovering what you should have known before signing, the emergency replacement scramble, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door when the relationship falls apart.
At ITBluPrint, this is the only thing we do. We run independent vendor selections, contract reviews, and MSP evaluations with the kind of reference pressure-testing that surfaces real answers, not rehearsed ones.
Book a free 30-minute consult to learn how to run a proper vendor reference check → itbluprint.com/contact-us
