Two Words I Despise: Trusted Advisor
“I’m a trusted advisor.” The VAR Guy hears that sentence over and over again from VARs, resellers and managed service providers. Frankly, the term has become meaningless in the past year. Here’s why.
Consider the following scenario.
Small Business CEO: “Our network is down.”
Small Business Manager’s response:
A) “I’ll call our network guy”
B) “I’ll call [insert VAR name]”
C) “I’ll call The VAR Guy”
D) “I’ll call our Trusted Advisor”
Answers A or B win. Answer C is illegal because The VAR Guy is now trademarked by Nine Lives Media Inc. (Sweet!) And answer D is laughable.
Fact is, The VAR Guy can’t think of a single small business owner who thinks of their VAR as a “trusted advisor.” Unfortunately, many resellers don’t even know that the term comes from the best selling book “Trusted Advisor” — which describes how you can build deep, lasting relationships with customers.
But in recent months, the book got lost in the shuffle. And the Trusted Advisor term has lost its meaning. The IT media hijacked the term to make resellers feel more valuable.
Alas, everybody has jumped on the Trusted Advisor bandwagon, even the low-margin resellers who consider four-port consumer switches to be profit opportunities.
Other than this blog entry, you won’t catch The VAR Guy throwing around the term Trusted Advisor. Oh, unless he’s referring to the fantastic book on the topic.
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Your right!
IT guys are a lot like lemmings, they’ll follow each other off a cliff for a buck. “Trusted Advisor” is a concept; it is NOT a title. The goal is to be viewed as a “Trusted Advisor” by your customer without ever mentioning the term to the customer. To ask a customer to refer to you or your firm as a “Trusted Advisor” without putting forth the work to earn the trust first is presumptuous toward the customer and insulting to all the other professionals (accountant, insurance agent and attorney) he trust for advice.
My customer can call me anything they like. So if one refers to me as a Trusted Partner, so be it. However I believe that when problems develop at a customer that needs technical attention most refer to us as #1: ‘network guy’ or ‘computer guy’. A four port $29 ethernet switch is a huge opportunity for us, as we would not want the customer to go elsewhere for even the most inexpensive technology solution. This is what one may call account control, but I call it ‘single point of contact for all your IT needs’ and this is a real benefit for an SMB client. So if I am proposing a $29 ethernet switch solution, I will make sure it has the most margin before I recommend it. For example, if a netgear 5 port switch costs us $26.50 and a dlink 5 port switch costs us $26.75, we are quoting the Netgear solution all day long, unless Dlink has a blowout sale for $25, then we switch to Dlink. Get it?
Call me anything. Just call me! 🙂