"We Liked Them": The Most Expensive Reason to Sign an IT Vendor

I asked twelve mid-market CIOs why they chose their current MSP. Eleven gave me some version of "we liked them." Six months later, eight of them were already in renegotiation conversations.

Salesperson chemistry is the single most-cited reason for choosing an IT vendor. It is also one of the worst predictors of how the relationship will actually go.

Here is why. In any healthy IT services company, the sales team and the delivery team are hired for opposite traits.

Salespeople are hired for charisma, polish, and the ability to navigate ambiguity, exactly the traits that get someone to "yes" in a 90-minute sales meeting. Delivery engineers are hired for technical depth, consistency, and a low tolerance for ambiguity, exactly the traits that make a Sunday-night incident go smoothly.

Those are not the same skill set. They are often the opposite skill set. Liking the sales team tells you essentially nothing about the delivery team, and may even be slightly negatively correlated, the more polished the pitch, the bigger the gap between the sold experience and the lived experience can feel.

So what should you measure instead?

Three substitutes for chemistry, in increasing order of how uncomfortable they are to ask for:

• Tenure on the delivery side. Ask for engineer names and how long they have been at the company. Not the account executive, the engineer who will actually open your tickets.
• A reference call with one client who left. Most vendors will tell you who their happy clients are. The interesting conversation is with a client who churned. What was the failure mode? Did the vendor own it gracefully?
• A live escalation test. Page their on-call line on a Sunday afternoon as part of the evaluation. Their salesperson will hate this. Do it anyway. The data is worth more than the awkwardness.

None of these are about chemistry. All of them are about delivery. And all of them are uncomfortable enough that most internal teams skip them, which is exactly why most internal teams end up in renegotiation 14 months later.

We run vendor selections this way for clients who would rather not learn the hard way. If you have got a selection coming up this quarter, ITBluPrint can run a cold-eyes evaluation alongside your gut check, happy to scope it. Start with a free scoping call