What’s the one thing a vendor did that put you off them for life?

I asked this question in my Facebook group this week: “What’s the one thing a vendor has done that’s completely put you off them for life?”.

The group is a vendor-free zone so it's a safe place to have these kinds of discussions.

(here's the original post)

I genuinely wasn’t prepared for the response 😃😃😃 At the time of writing this article it has 34 comments, all of them from MSPs letting rip.

I won’t name any vendors here. But I do want to share the patterns about their perceived bad behaviour. They reveal how easy it is to lose a client’s trust forever, in one moment, without even realising you’ve done it.

The sales calls that never stop

This came up over and over. Multiple phone calls a day. Weeks of relentless outreach after someone had already said no. One person said they had to block a vendor’s entire phone number just to get them to stop.

Another described being called from a local area code, deliberately, so they’d be tricked into picking up thinking it could be a potential new client. One MSP owner said a vendor started calling his personal cell phone.

Think about the trust that destroys, permanently, in seconds.

Making it impossible to leave

Several stories were about vendors who made cancelling feel like escaping a hostage situation. Contracts enforced to the letter even after a business had stopped operating.

One person described a vendor pursuing the remaining balance of a contract through collections rather than negotiating a reasonable exit, even after the relationship had completely broken down.

Another mentioned auto-renewal terms buried in an email, timed so the renewal window had already passed by the time anyone noticed. And a brutal one... a vendor who blacklisted a customer, permanently, simply for choosing to use a competing product.

That's the kind of thing someone remembers for the rest of their working life.

Billing that takes months to fix

A recurring theme. Billing errors that should take an afternoon to resolve, dragging on for months. One person described being told “things happen” when they asked why a critical billing issue hadn’t been addressed.

This is a great example where the mistake itself doesn't damage the relationship but the way it's handled does.

Feeling stupid, or feeling like a number

I couldn't quite believe this one... an MSP owner asked a vendor at a conference how their product compared to what he was already using. The vendor laughed and told him, in front of other people, that he was stupid for using his current provider.

Another described a vendor who had never met them once in seven years, despite being their main point of contact, and then had the nerve to act wounded when they eventually switched to a local competitor they’d built a real relationship with instead.

And here's one that’s become depressingly familiar to all of us... getting passed to an AI chatbot for a problem that badly needed a human being. Does that frustrate you as much as it does me?

Reading through all of this, I couldn’t stop thinking about one thing...

Every single one of these stories is about a business that thought they were doing something reasonable. Such as enforcing a contract, following a process or protecting revenue. None of these vendors set out to be the villain of a Facebook post!!

But somehow they stopped seeing that there was another human being at the end of the relationship.

Of course MSPs are not immune to this, especially as you grow and you, as the owner, start to have less day-to-day contact with clients. Every single behaviour described above has an equivalent that could be happening inside your own MSP right now, without you noticing.

That's a scary thought, isn't it

So there's a question worth asking yourself

If one of your clients answered the question I asked, but about your MSP, what would they say????

QUESTION: What’s the one thing a vendor has done that put you off them for life? Let me know, I’d love to hear it (but name no names please). And more importantly: has it made you think about anything in your own business? I read and reply to every email  😃