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Don't go it alone. If you can, have an assistant pick up the phone, or assign someone on your staff to manage vendor traffic.
At Starz Entertainment Group, a privately held movie channel, Vice President of IT Gary Pfeiffer offloads most of the responsibility for handling vendor inquiries to his manager of IT security and architecture. Tarrant County's Smith has staff check the dedicated email box. Bill Schlageter, the vice president and CIO at $1.7-billion dental products company Dentsply International, never takes cold calls. "If I did, I would spend the entire day talking with vendors," he quips. (He also never volunteers his email address.) It falls to his assistant to handle calls.
Request product literature. With materials in hand, you can efficiently review all recent inquiries at once rather than field one-off calls that take you away from what you were doing before the phone rang.
At Dentsply, Schlageter's assistant asks callers to send him literature, which Schlageter then reviews regularly -- usually every two weeks, on weekends. If the information piques his interest, he holds on to it, and occasionally he'll even speak with the vendor reps, who almost always follow up with a phone call.
At Starz, Mike Ethridge is the go-to guy for vendors. As Pfeiffer's "technology filter," Ethridge will listen to vendors if he knows or has heard of the company, but he asks the 10% he hasn't heard of for case studies and white papers. He then follows up if the information is relevant. "You have to manage your time," he says.
Treg Russell, CIO of Texas Medical Liability Trust, a $200-million physician-owned insurance provider, usually avoids vendor calls using caller ID ("I don't have a lot of out-of-state vendors, so I don't answer a long-distance number that I don't recognize," he says). But when he does find himself on the phone with a vendor sales rep, he asks for additional information to be sent via email.
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