I think most people can agree that hard sales tactics are intimidating and uncomfortable, so I never encourage anyone to go for that sell from the onset. Any good sales person probably already knows this.  Equally, once you’ve entered into a project or partnership with someone, I think it’s still important not to be pushy and to give equal respect to your vendors or clients.

Recently we contracted a vendor to help with a project and let them know that our resources are a bit limited so we wanted to get things going but we didn’t know what pace we’d be able to work at. I thought that was pretty clear when we started the project. We started to get emails about the project and asking us repeatedly for timelines and action to be taken, so I responded that our resources are v ery limited and we’re working on it. That seemed to do the trick.

Apparently not. I received a pretty pushy email today explaining that they need dates and they have other projects too so they can’t just leave this one hanging and they have internal deadlines and such that we need to cooperate with. I didn’t initiate this project, so I’m leaving it to the person who did initiate it to respond.

So, here’s my gripe…we already said we couldn’t jump right to it, so why are you? Why don’t you just give more attention to your other projects and set this one on a back burner like we have? We’ve already entered the contract with you, and we don’t have any intention of bailing on it. We just need a bit of space and some time to get the other departments here as excited as we are about this.

What to do?  I thought I was clear before, but I guess not so… how do you handle this kind of pushy vendor?

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