Continuing my attempts to bring Shakespeare into as many posts as I can….
Let specialties be therefore drawn between us,
That covenants may be kept on either hand.(Taming of the Shrew II. i. 127-8)
A couple of weeks ago, I presented at the HR Technology Conference in Chicago, the topic being SaaS Contracts: how not to get ripped off. I made an animation to start the presentation, as talking about contracts can be a bit dry.
If the embedded version doesn’t behave, watch it here. My goal was to show the naivete of the typical buyer when dealing with a smooth salesperson. In the space of about 2 minutes, the buyer makes at least 9 major blunders. See if you can spot them. It is supposed to be funny, but I’ll let you be the judge of that.
A week or so after the event I did a podcast on the Bill Kutik Radio Show, where I go into a bit more detail. Have a listen here. I’m not a lawyer, so this doesn’t constitute legal advice, but I’m saddened by the ignorance on the side of the buyer, and the willingness of the seller to exploit that. That is business, I guess.
Or as Camillo said in The Winter’s tale:
You pay a great deal too dear for what’s given freely.
Also we have a lot of research on how to buy cloud/SaaS solutions. Gartner clients should definitely check out Alexa Bona’s research. Whether buying or selling, getting a fair contract is best in the long run.
(I’m very impressed with the Xtranormal tool for animation. I checked with their legal folks on usage, what a pleasure to deal with them).
Vendorprisey 
Although we rarely run into buyers this naive, I’m constantly amazed that it’s frequently us (the vendor) who insists that the client do their homework: Evaluate properly, conduct a pilot phase with real users, try the integrations, look at the analytics screens, play with the settings, make sure the product meets your needs and your users like it, etc.
In some cases we even reserve the right to not sell to a client until after they’ve properly tested the product. Unhappy clients wouldn’t be good for our reputation, and cost us more than they earn us. I guess it’s different at enterprise-scale, but it really shouldn’t.
It’s very rare that anyone asks us tough questions. Which is a bit sad in a way, we love tough questions, they make our lives more insteresting too. Come on buyers, you can do better than that!
Per.
I guess you are one of the good guys.
Thomas