----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Pozar" <pozar@lns.com> To: "Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan@verisign.com> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Thursday, March 24, 2005 7:29 PM Subject: Re: "Bandwidth Advisors" - www.bandwidthadvisors.com --- snip ---
I know a bunch of consultants out there (me being one, Bill Woodcock, etc.) that do not take money from vendors they recommend. How can a client of a consultant really know they have the best deal when the "consultant" will not investigate all of the options out there?
how do you know that a consultant that you pay will investigate all the options out there? they may not be aware of all the options or may not want to take up so much time working on your deal, for example. good agents have the same reasons to find you a good deal as good consultants do - repeat business and good reputation in the industry. both bad consultants and agents exist who see it differently. comparing a well-respected consultant such as bill to a hypothetical bad agent is an excercise devoid of meaning.
Even if I did pay the fee, that means that their clients can't get the best deal as I need to raise my fees to client to cover the "small residual payment" going to "Bandwidth Advisors".
no, you pay their fee out of the same pot you use to pay your sales guys, your marketing guys (if you have any), your advertising/marketing expenses etc. they bring the deal to you, meaning you've spent $0 to acquire the lead up to that point. unless you operate on word of mouth only and do sales yourself (and pay yourself $0/hr), $0 < $your_avg_customer_acquisition_cost. in short, it's the customer's choice whether they'd like to do the legwork themselves, hire a consultant or use an agent who is paid by the seller. a consultant may find you the best deal, but if you're not buying much the overall cost per meg may be higher than list when you factor in the consulting fees, for example. using an agent in this case may make sense. some agents offer direct ports and do their own billing, so you can get a better price by taking advantage of the volume pricing they enjoy. the world is not black and white.
For those that don't know... I am now the COO of UnitedLayer. It sounds like, since I am not going to pay the "extortion" fee to Bandwidth Advisors, that their consultants won't know about our pricing and services.
i'm curious to see by what feat of logic you managed to classify what they do as extortion. they have leads which you may (or may not, as the case may be) want access to and are asking for compensation for access thereto. if you don't agree with the compensation, you don't have to do the deal. assuming an agent's clients are not intelligent enough to understand how agency works and further assuming that the agent is misleading their customers in this respect, i can see how it would be unethical from a somewhat idealistic point of view (which i happen to share). however, i posit that those two assumptions are rarely correct at the same time and are definitely not correct in this case as the quote from their website demonstrates. i think this has gone sufficiently off-topic at this point (assuming it was ever on-topic), so i'd like to request that replies be sent off-list. -p --- paul galynin