Partner vs Vendor: What’s the difference?

June was a busy travel month for me. I flew around the country to major cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Boston, just to name a few. 

While I did take some internal meetings on these trips, the primary purpose of my travel was to visit key customers. Engaging with customers at a deeper level was a great opportunity to understand their goals, plans, and challenges and to reflect on what has made our customers successful.

Soon after Mission was founded, we established a set of core values that have guided us on our entire journey as a business. One of these values is Focused on Our Customers, which we describe as:

Interestingly, this is a core value we share with our partner, AWS. They use the term Customer Obsession, but the underlying core value is the same. Sharing a deep focus on a customer-first mentality creates a strong foundation for success, but fully realizing that success is still a monumental task.

Collaboration is Hard

As an AWS services partner, Mission has the unique opportunity to team up in a tri-party collaboration: Mission, AWS, and our shared customers. Achieving effective collaboration between three parties is, on paper, quite a big challenge. If you have school-aged children with group projects for school, you’ve very likely seen just how challenging it can be!

In an effective collaboration, all three parties must share a common understanding of goals, strategy, and tactics. When the parties are not aligned, things can go off the rails quickly. The symptoms of misalignment are clear: finger-pointing, disagreements about scope, selective memory, and constantly shifting priorities.

Collaboration Demands Courage

It's easy to say that you are customer-obsessed as a business, but putting that promise into practice requires commitment. 

People often scoff at the notion that a business like AWS can be customer-obsessed at scale. After all, their ultimate business goal is to increase platform consumption, which can appear to be at odds with customer goals.

Thankfully, I’ve seen AWS prove its commitment to customer obsession countless times. AWS is constantly iterating on its services, achieving greater efficiency that it can pass on to customers through lower prices. In our shared customer conversations, the aim is never to artificially drive consumption, but to continuously optimize to ensure healthy consumption. 

In this case, customer obsession demands playing the long game. If a customer is achieving their goals optimally on the platform, their consumption will grow as a natural consequence of that success.

Mission is an AWS reseller, which puts us in the same boat as AWS. Due to our shared values, Mission is in lockstep with AWS and with our customers, focusing on the customer achieving their goals efficiently, and that demands more than a customer/vendor relationship.

Collaboration is a Partnership

One of my trips in June was to Boston, where I was able to spend some time with long-time customer, the Boston Celtics. 

In my 7+ years at Mission, I’ve developed a great deal of respect for the Celtics and for their CTO, Jay Wessland. During my visit, Jay and I had the chance to reflect on our business relationship and what factors contributed most to our shared success. In those conversations, I noticed that we used the term “partnership” much more frequently than “customer” and “vendor.”

While that insight may seem small, I think it's a wonderful reflection of true customer obsession in practice. The three-way collaboration between Mission, AWS, and the Celtics goes well beyond a typical customer/vendor relationship. 

If you were to dial in to a weekly sprint planning meeting, you would find a global team of technologists working together toward a common goal, and I would wager you’d be unable to identify which team members worked for AWS, Mission, or the Celtics.

The notion of customers as partners is embedded deep into the DNA of Mission, so it comes as no surprise that we’re not a traditional consulting firm. Rather than delivering one or two project outcomes, we’re in long-term partnerships with our customers, helping them extract the maximum from the power of the AWS platform.

If your business prioritizes customer obsession, consider thinking of your customer engagements as partnerships! It will set you on a path of effective collaboration, with mutual benefit for all parties.