3 Signs You’re Dealing with a Foolish Vendor

The definition of foolish is lacking good sense or judgment; unwise. Have you ever worked with a vendor who you felt wasn’t making sound decisions or their judgment regarding a situation was very poor? It can be a challenging situation to be in.

3 Signs You’re Dealing with a Foolish Vendor

Here are three signs that may mean you’re dealing with a foolish vendor:

1. The vendor has bad ethics. You’re noticing the vendor never puts your best interests into consideration. You may have even started to notice a lot of employee turnover and poor customer reviews which leads you to believe that they also don’t seem to value their employees or customers as much as they should.
   
   
2. The vendor makes product/service changes that impact your operations, but fails to give you any warning. Here’s a good example. If you’re outsourcing a service to a software provider and they make a major update to their platform that completely changes the way the software works, yet they don’t give you any notice it’s going to happen and/or no opportunity for training, it’s going to cause halts in operations and inefficiencies at your organization. Of course, everyone who uses the product will be very frustrated. Another situation could be they discontinue support of a product or service on which you rely with little or no notice.
   
   
3. The vendor makes promises they can’t keep. If the vendor is constantly promising set pricing, product/service updates, committing to provide something to you by a deadline but not doing so, are very unresponsive to your concerns, etc. 

As you can see, in these scenarios, vendors are acting unwisely and not using good judgment. This is unwise because when a customer is in a scenario like the ones mentioned above, they’re very likely to terminate the contract and find another vendor who seems to care more.

2 Next Steps When Dealing with a Foolish Vendor

You have options. If you feel you’re dealing with a foolish vendor, here are our recommended next steps:

1. Talk to the vendor. Communicate your concerns. Make it very apparent that you’re noticing a trend and there’s often a lack in proper judgement in some areas. Document the conversation or put the entire concern in writing.
   
   
2. Write requirements into the contract. If possible, try to write expectations into your vendor contract. Consider the example regarding failure to warn or to provide training on a major product update. In that case, try to write into your contract that you must be notified of significant updates so many days in advance and see if you can also request that you’ll be offered a certain number of training hours to help your team understand the major updates.
   
   
3. Seek out other vendors. If all else fails, it may be time to start looking into other vendor options. Plan ahead and start researching vendors well in advance of your contract’s termination date. Seek direction and input from your senior management team and board, if at all possible.

We hope that you’re not dealing with a foolish vendor, but if you are, it’s important to know the signs to watch for and what your options are so that you can ensure you’re protecting your organization and customers.

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