When dealing with real estate purchases, we have discrete roles defined legally as to when a real estate agent represents the seller or when they represent the buyer.\u00a0 Each party gets clear documentation as to how they are being represented.\u00a0 In both cases, the agent is bound by honesty and ethical limitations, but beyond that their obligations are to their represented party.<\/p>\n
Outside of the real estate world, most of us do not deal with buyer’s agents very often.\u00a0 Seller’s agents are everywhere, we just call them salespeople.\u00a0 We deal with them at many stores and they are especially evident when we go to buy something large, like a car.<\/p>\n
In business, buyer’s agents are actually pretty common and actually come in some interesting and unspoken forms.\u00a0 Rarely does anyone actually talk about buyer’s agents in business terms, mostly because we are not talking about buying objects but about buying solutions, services or designs.\u00a0 Identifying buyer’s and seller’s agents alone can become confusing and, often, companies may not even recognize when a transaction of this nature is taking place.<\/p>\n
We mostly see the engagement of sellers – they are the vendors with products and services that they want us to purchase.\u00a0 We can pretty readily identify the seller’s agents that are involved.\u00a0 These include primarily the staff of the vendor itself and the sales people (which includes pre-sales engineering and any “technical” resource that gets compensation by means of the sale rather than being explicitly engaged and remunerated to represent your own interests) of the resellers (resellers being a blanket term for any company that is compensated for selling products, services or ideas that they themselves do not produce; this commonly includes value added resellers and stores.)\u00a0 The seller’s side is easy.\u00a0 Are they making money by somehow getting me to buy something?\u00a0 If so… seller’s agent.<\/p>\n
Buyer’s agents are more difficult to recognize.\u00a0 So much so that it is common for businesses to forget to engage them, overlook them or confuse seller’s agents for them.\u00a0 Sadly, outside of real estate, the strict codes of conduct and legal oversight do not exist and ensuring that seller’s agent is not engaged mistakenly where a buyer’s agent should be is purely up to the organization engaging said parties.<\/p>\n
Buyer’s agents come in many forms but the most common, yet hardest to recognize, is the IT department or staff, themselves.\u00a0 This may seem like a strange thought, but the IT department acts as a technical representative of the business and, because they are not the business themselves directly, an emotional stop gap that can aid in reducing the effects of marketing and sales tactics while helping to ensure that technical needs are met.\u00a0 The IT team is the most important buyer’s agent in the IT supply chain and the last line of defense for companies to ensure that they are engaging well and getting the services, products and advice that they need.<\/p>\n
Commonly\u00a0 IT departments will engage consulting services to aid in decision making. The paid consulting firm is the most identifiable buyer’s agent in the process and the one that is most often skipped (or a seller’s agent is mistaken for the consultant.)\u00a0 A consultant is hired by, paid by and has an ethical responsibility to represent the buyer.\u00a0 Consultants have an additional air gap that helps to separate them from the emotional responses common of the business itself.\u00a0 The business and its internal IT staff are easily motivated by having “cool solutions” or expensive “toys” or can be easily caused to panic through good marketing, but consultants have many advantages.<\/p>\n
Consultants have the advantage that they are often specialists in the area in question or at least spend their time dealing with many vendors, resellers, products, ideas and customer needs.\u00a0 They can more easily take a broad view of needs and bring a different type of experience to the decision table.<\/p>\n
Consultants are not the ones who, at the end of the day, get to “own” the products, services or solutions in question and are generally judged on their ability to aid the business effectively.\u00a0 Because of this they have a distinct advantage in being more emotionally distant and therefore more objective in deciding on recommendations.\u00a0 The coolest, newest solutions have little effect on them while cost effectiveness and business viability do.\u00a0 More importantly, consultants and internal IT working together provide an important balancing of biases, experience and business understandings that combine the broad experience across many vendors and customers of the one, and the deep understanding of the individual business of the other.<\/p>\n
One can actually think of the Buyer’s and Seller’s Agent system as a “stack”.\u00a0 When a business needs to acquire new services, products or to get advice, the ideal and full stack would look something like this: Business > IT Department > ITSP\/Consultants <> Value Added Reseller < Distributor < Vendor.\u00a0 The <> denotes the reflection point between the buyer’s side and the seller’s side.\u00a0 Of course, many transactions will not involve and should not involve the entire stack.\u00a0 But this visualization can be effective in understanding how these pieces are “designed” to interface with each other.\u00a0 The business should ideally get the final options from IT (IT can be outsourced, of course), IT should interface through an ITSP consultant in many cases, and so forth.\u00a0 An important part of the processes is keeping actors on the left side of the stack (or the bottom) from having direct contact with those high up in the stack (or on the right) because this can short circuit the protections that the system provides allowing vendors or sales staff to influence the business without the buyer’s agents being able to vet the information.<\/p>\n
Identifying, understanding and leveraging the buyer’s and seller’s agent system is important to getting good, solid advice and sales for any business and is widely applicable far outside of IT.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When dealing with real estate purchases, we have discrete roles defined legally as to when a real estate agent represents the seller or when they represent the buyer.\u00a0 Each party gets clear documentation as to how they are being represented.\u00a0 In both cases, the agent is bound by honesty and ethical limitations, but beyond that … Continue reading Buyers and Sellers Agents in IT<\/span>