Dawn Sizer, CEO, 3rd Element Consulting

Vendors are getting pushier [with] their sales process. That has not been comfortable for anyone involved. To give you an idea, it’s not uncommon [for me] to get 400 emails a day—sales emails. And that’s from LinkedIn, regular email, you name it. I’ve literally had to take myself off our phone directory so that people would stop calling me. That’s how bad it has gotten. That’s the post-COVID world of sales. I think some of them are trying to build relationships. And I think that is working very, very well for them. Some of them have not gotten that memo yet. So, this is their memo: Please go build relationships and stop filling my email box. Because I’m not going to reply to you. But anytime that you have a personal relationship with folks, I think you’re more open to any sales conversation that there is to be had. They’re doing themselves a service by building that relationship. Because if one of my vendor’s salespeople calls me up, I’m going to take the call.

Brian Martz, President, TechGuides

They are changing the way they do business with us, and I think it’s in a positive way. They’re more flexible and they have more ramp-up time to get new solutions rolled out, especially with cybersecurity. You can’t roll out 2,000 endpoints in 30 days, so they’ve given you six months-plus to ramp things up and get your cybersecurity stack rolling.