The Vendor Is Not Your Friend

Your account manager remembers your birthday. They check in regularly, not just at renewal time. They seem genuinely interested in your success. They celebrate your wins and commiserate your challenges.

It feels like partnership. It feels like friendship, even.

It's neither.

I'm not saying vendors are evil. Most of the account managers I've worked with are decent people doing their jobs. But their job is not your success. Their job is revenue retention and expansion. Sometimes those align. Often they don't.

Understanding this distinction is the difference between managing a vendor relationship and being managed by one.

The Incentive Misalignment

Let's be clear about how vendor incentives actually work.

Your account manager is measured on:

• Renewal rate (did you re-sign?)
• Net revenue retention (did you spend more than last year?)
• Expansion revenue (did you buy additional products or seats?)
• Customer health scores (are you likely to churn?)

Notice what's not on that list: whether the software actually solved your problem. Whether you're getting value proportional to what you're paying. Whether you'd be better served by a different solution. Whether you should be building this capability yourself.

These metrics create predictable behaviours:

They'll recommend expansion before optimisation. Having trouble with the current implementation? The answer is rarely "let's fix what you have." It's usually "you need the premium tier" or "you should add this module."

They'll discourage evaluation of alternatives. Your contract coming up? Expect a flurry of attention, new features highlighted, maybe a discount dangled. What you won't get is an honest assessment of whether competitors might serve you better.

They'll minimise problems until they threaten renewal. That bug you've reported three times? It'll stay low priority until you mention you're "evaluating options." Suddenly, engineering resources materialise.

They'll lock you in wherever possible. Proprietary data formats. Integrations that only work within their ecosystem. Pricing structures that penalise leaving. Every design decision tilts towards making departure painful.

None of this is malicious. It's rational behaviour given their incentive structure. But rational for them is often irrational for you.

The Relationship Theatre

Vendor relationships involve a peculiar kind of theatre.

The Quarterly Business Review: A ritual where your vendor presents charts showing your "success" on their platform. Usage metrics, adoption rates, support ticket trends. What they don't show: whether any of this translates to business value. The QBR exists to make you feel good about the relationship, not to assess whether the relationship makes sense.

The Customer Advisory Board: You feel special being invited. You're helping shape the product roadmap! In reality, you're providing free market research while being shown just enough of the roadmap to stay invested. The features you request will arrive on their timeline, not yours, if they arrive at all.

The Executive Sponsor: A senior person at the vendor who's "assigned to your account." They appear at important meetings, promise escalation paths, make you feel valued. Their actual involvement: minimal. Their actual power to change anything for you: limited. Their actual purpose: making you feel important enough to stay.

The Partnership Language: You're not a customer, you're a "partner." The contract isn't a purchase, it's a "strategic relationship." The sales team isn't selling, they're "co-creating solutions." The language obscures the fundamental nature of the transaction: you pay them money, they provide software. That's not partnership. That's commerce.

I've sat through dozens of these performances. They're often enjoyable. The people are often likeable. But confusing theatre for reality leads to bad decisions.

The Renewal Trap

The renewal cycle is where misalignment becomes most visible.

Here's how it typically works:

Months 1-9 of your contract: Minimal proactive contact. Support requests handled routinely. Your account manager is focused on accounts closer to renewal.

Months 10-11: Suddenly, you're important again. Check-in calls. Executive visits. Questions about your roadmap, your challenges, your satisfaction.

Month 12: The renewal conversation. And here's where it gets interesting.

If you're happy and not paying attention, you'll renew at the same rate or higher. Price increases are positioned as standard, unavoidable, "cost of doing business."

If you're unhappy, you'll be offered concessions. Discounts. Additional features. Promises of prioritised support. These concessions were always available. They just weren't offered until your departure seemed possible.

If you're paying attention, you'll realise something: the renewal conversation is the only moment you have leverage. The other eleven months, the vendor has the leverage. They have your data. They have your workflows. They have your institutional knowledge embedded in their system.

Smart organisations treat renewals as procurement events, not administrative formalities. They evaluate alternatives. They benchmark pricing. They negotiate from strength. Most organisations just sign.

The Data Hostage Situation

Let's talk about what happens when you want to leave.

Your data is in their system. Years of it, possibly. Transactions, relationships, history, institutional knowledge. You need that data.

Can you export it? Technically, yes. Most vendors offer export functionality. They have to, legally in many jurisdictions.

But the export is never clean. The data comes out in their format, not yours. Relationships between records may not survive the export. Custom fields, configurations, workflows, all lost or mangled. The data you get back is a shadow of what you put in.

This isn't accidental. Easy data portability would make switching easier. Hard data portability makes switching painful. Every vendor understands this calculus.

The result: you're in a data hostage situation. You can leave, but your data can't come with you intact. The cost of departure includes rebuilding what you thought you owned.

I've watched organisations stay with inadequate vendors for years because the data migration cost seemed too high. The vendor knows this. They're counting on it.

The Roadmap Hostage Situation

There's another hostage situation playing out, more subtle but equally constraining: the roadmap.

You need a feature. Maybe it's critical to your operations. You've requested it through proper channels. You've been told it's "on the roadmap."

What does "on the roadmap" actually mean?

It means they're aware you want it. It doesn't mean they'll build it. It doesn't mean they'll build it soon. It doesn't mean they'll build it the way you need it.

Your feature request goes into a prioritisation queue with hundreds of others. It's weighed against the requests of larger customers, the strategic direction the product team wants to pursue, the engineering resources available. Your voice is one of many. Usually a quiet one.

But you can't build it yourself. The system is closed. You can't extend it, modify it, or work around its limitations in any fundamental way. You're dependent on their roadmap.

So you wait. You develop workarounds. You adjust your processes to fit the software rather than adjusting the software to fit your processes. And you stay, because switching would mean starting the roadmap hostage situation over with a different vendor.

The Price Escalation Game

Let's talk about pricing, because this is where vendor incentives become most directly extractive.

Year one: Competitive pricing. Maybe a discount to win your business. The vendor is investing in acquiring you as a customer.

Year two: A price increase. 5-10%, positioned as "standard annual adjustment." You're already implemented, already dependent. The switching cost exceeds the price increase. You pay.

Year three: Another increase. Maybe larger. "Our costs have increased." "We've added features." "This reflects the value you're receiving." The same calculus applies. You pay.

Year four and beyond: The increases continue. Your original competitive price is now 40%, 50%, higher than when you started. You're paying premium rates for software that's become legacy technology.

Meanwhile, new customers are being offered the competitive pricing you got in year one. The vendor is simultaneously milking existing customers and undercutting on price to win new ones.

This isn't a bug in the vendor business model. It's the core of the model. Customer acquisition cost is paid once. Revenue extraction continues forever, with the switching cost as leverage.

The True Cost of Vendor Dependency

Add it all up:

Direct costs: Licence fees, support fees, implementation costs, training costs, integration costs, annual increases, premium tier upgrades.

Indirect costs: Staff time managing the vendor relationship. Workarounds for missing features. Lost productivity from inadequate tooling. Opportunity cost of budget locked into existing contracts.

Strategic costs: Capabilities you can't build because you've outsourced them. Speed you can't achieve because you're waiting on vendor roadmaps. Differentiation you can't create because you're using the same tools as every competitor.

Exit costs: Data migration. New system implementation. Retraining. Workflow reconstruction. The years of institutional knowledge that doesn't transfer.

Most organisations only measure direct costs. The true cost of vendor dependency is often 3-5x the line item on the invoice.

What Healthy Vendor Relationships Look Like

I'm not arguing for vendor elimination. Some software should be purchased. Some relationships create genuine value.

But healthy vendor relationships look different from what most organisations have:

Clear-eyed about incentives. You understand that your account manager's goals are not your goals. You don't mistake friendliness for alignment. You evaluate their recommendations through the lens of their incentives.

Renewal-ready always. You don't wait until month 11 to think about renewal. You maintain continuous awareness of alternatives. You keep your data exportable. You avoid lock-in wherever possible.

Value-focused evaluation. You measure whether the software is delivering business value, not just whether it's being used. Usage without value is still failure.

Leverage-aware negotiation. You understand when you have leverage and when you don't. You negotiate accordingly. You're willing to walk away when the relationship isn't working.

Build vs. buy as a live question. You continuously evaluate whether capabilities should be purchased or built. What made sense to buy five years ago might make sense to build today.

Exit planning from day one. You plan for exit before you sign. Data portability, contract terms, knowledge transfer. If you can't leave, you're not a customer. You're a captive.

The Build Alternative

Here's what's changed: building is now a realistic alternative in ways it wasn't before.

Five years ago, buying made sense for most software needs. Building was expensive, slow, required specialised skills, and carried significant risk. Vendors had genuine advantages.

AI has shifted this calculus. A small team can now build capabilities that would have required large teams or vendor purchases. The build option is faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

This doesn't mean you should build everything. But it means build vs. buy should be a genuine evaluation, not a foregone conclusion.

When you build:

• You own the capability
• You control the roadmap
• You can differentiate
• Your data stays yours
• Your costs don't escalate annually

When you buy:

• You get faster time to value (sometimes)
• You get maintained and updated software (in theory)
• You avoid development risk (but accept vendor risk)
• You trade capital expense for operating expense

The right answer depends on the specific capability, your specific organisation, your specific constraints. But the answer should come from analysis, not habit.

The Questions to Ask

Before your next vendor meeting, renewal, or purchase decision, ask yourself:

What are their incentives right now? Are they trying to close a deal? Prevent churn? Expand revenue? Understanding their incentives helps you interpret their recommendations.

What would they never tell me? That a competitor is better? That you don't need the premium tier? That you should build this yourself? The things vendors won't say are often the things you most need to know.

What's my leverage? Am I close to renewal? Do I have alternatives? Am I a large customer or small? Have I clearly signalled willingness to leave? Your negotiating position depends on honest answers to these questions.

What's my exit cost? If I wanted to leave, what would it take? How painful would data migration be? How much institutional knowledge is locked in their system? If you don't know, find out.

What's the build alternative? Could my team build this capability? What would it cost? How long would it take? What would I own at the end? These questions should be asked for every significant vendor relationship.

The Uncomfortable Truth

The uncomfortable truth is this: vendor relationships are commercial relationships. They're governed by contracts, driven by incentives, and optimised for revenue extraction.

That's not a moral failing. Vendors are businesses. They exist to make money. Expecting them to prioritise your success over their revenue is like expecting a wolf to guard sheep.

The moral failing is on our side when we pretend otherwise. When we mistake account management for partnership. When we stop evaluating alternatives because the relationship feels comfortable. When we let vendor roadmaps determine our capabilities.

Your vendors are not your friends. Some of them are genuinely good people. Some of them genuinely want you to succeed. But the structures they operate within optimise for their outcomes, not yours.

Understanding this doesn't make you cynical. It makes you clear-eyed. And clear eyes are what you need when someone else controls capabilities your business depends on.