As industry analysts, we attend a lot of briefings with IT vendors. While we are clearly interested in the content of these, you can also learn a lot about an organisation and its culture by how the people you meet present themselves and conduct the discussion.

Some vendors take a very marketing led approach, with lots of positioning material to “frame” the problem they are trying to address with their offerings in a way that highlights their strengths and de-emphasises their weaknesses or limitations. This is understandable and I can’t blame people for doing it at all, but for a primary research-centred analyst firm like us that is continuously gathering requirements, views and perceptions from the buying community, it means we sometimes have to prefix the substance of a briefing with a reality check on what really is and isn’t important to the vendor’s customers and prospects.

The briefings I like the most, however, are those in which the people you are talking with just state the practical reality of the world, as seen through the eyes of their customers, then go on to discuss what they are doing against this background in a pragmatic and down to earth way. This is by far the most effective way of dealing with analysts. Not only does it make our jobs easier and create a positive impression, but it also suggests that the vendor is likely to be engaging with its customers in a similarly open and objective manner.

We had one such briefing a couple of weeks ago with a company called GXS. For those not familiar with the organisation, its core business is about “enabling organisations to do business with each other electronically”. Central to its activities is the GXS Trading Grid, a hosted “exchange” which is used as a hub to route and clear electronic transactions, primarily in the Retail, Automotive, Hi-Tech Manufacturing and Financial Services sectors. If you want to know more about this, check out the GXS website, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that GXS illustrates the cultural dimension I alluded to above. The conversation we had was open, spin free and very engaging, and the centre of reference for pretty much everything we discussed was exactly what it should be—the problems and challenges faced by the kinds of organisations GXS is trying to help. And what really impressed us was GXS’s willingness to tackle some of the less glamorous and, dare I say, less lucrative parts of the problem in an effort to provide a total solution, at least in the domain within which it operates. It’s kind of the equivalent of a bus company defining its mission as providing an inclusive public transport service, rather than closing down routes in rural areas and just concentrating on the easy money in towns and cities.

So let’s take a couple of examples in the context of GXS’s business.

If you are a large organisation trying to drive automation into your supply chain to increase efficiency, visibility, responsiveness and so on, it is not enough to just put the relevant technologies and services in place your end and expect your suppliers to just hook in. The average supply chain will be made up of suppliers of varying sizes with varying degrees of technical capability and competence. Furthermore, it is not always obvious what’s in it for the supplier, especially if they are a smaller organisation with limited resources. The whole thing therefore translates to a big education, awareness and motivation challenge.

Realising that lots of its customers were struggling with this, GXS decided to step up to the mark and help sort it out through something called GXS Community Link. It’s a nice sounding name for something which really boils down to GXS rolling up its sleeves and getting stuck into the donkey work of supplier recruitment into the automated trading process on behalf of its larger clients, employing good old fashioned direct marketing techniques, backed up with the necessary education and advice, to get large numbers of suppliers hooked in electronically. Of course there are consulting firms out there who will do this kind of thing on a bespoke basis, but it is nice to see a service provider essentially packaging this up as a service based on a repeatable (hence, cost effective) process.

The second example relates to the problem of product data quality. In the retail sector, for example, it is common for retailers to rely on product descriptions and specifications provided electronically by suppliers, which often just “pass through” into catalogues, onto labels and so on. In the context of logistics, accurate product information is also important, e.g. the weight, dimensions, temperature tolerance, etc of a product declared in an electronic specification by the original supplier may be used as the basis for loading trucks optimally for transportation, and warehousing products appropriately.

GXS has again bitten the bullet and taken the problem away from the client, this time through services provided by UDEX, a company it acquired in November last year. When the guys described what the UDEX service did during our briefing, basically cleansing and validating huge amounts of third party product information, we waited in eager anticipation to hear about some great patented technology that automatically processes all of this stuff and spits out high quality output at the end. To be honest, if this was what we had heard, we probably wouldn’t have believed it, so it was a bit of a relief when we were told that the process was about 50% automated and 50% based on a small army of specialists who just apply common sense, industry knowledge and vigilant eyeballs to check through new records and entries manually as they emerge from the various sources. So, more unglamorous donkey work that maybe some high tech vendors or service providers would shy away from, but that’s absolutely fundamental to solving the business problem.

The lesson from all this is that the mindset with which vendors approach the market, which we as analysts see manifested as they way they conduct themselves in briefings, has a real bearing on how customers can take advantage of a relationship with them. When the pivot point for a supplier’s thinking and engagement model is its own technology or service, the old adage “If all you have is a hammer, the world looks like it’s full of nails” very much applies, and this limits the supplier’s value as a strategic partner. That’s not necessarily a problem per se, you just deal with such suppliers as, well, just suppliers. They might deliver a great product or service, but you may not necessarily ask their advice and guidance on things that require a balanced view of the bigger picture.

Just as a final caveat in relation to this discussion, though, when I was talking this through with my colleague Jon Collins, he made the point that the view we sometimes get from executives does not always translate to behaviour at field level, through account managers, technical teams, etc. This is definitely something to look out for when vendors are employing “peer to peer” selling techniques, with executives marking executives, architects marking architects and so on, and why it is important for customers to have a coordinated approach internally to supplier management. But that’s another topic that I’ll pick up in a later post based on research we have conducted in association with the book.

In the meantime, hat tip to GXS for a very “together” view and approach.