As you are planning a trip to an offshore vendor, you can save yourself a lot of time by applying this simple rule.

Tell the vendors that you don’t want to do anything while you are there that you could have done while you are in the USA (or UK). This means that you don’t want to be taken through PowerPoints there that could have been shown to you here.

If you don’t do this, you may be exposed to what we call “Death by PowerPoint”. You will be taken through hours of sophisticated, well-thought-out, PowerPoints, and will be bored by day #2. But if you follow this simple rule, the whole dynamics of the trip will change. There will still be some PowerPoints, but the trip will become more about understanding the capabilities of the specific people you meet (e.g. your team leaders etc.), and about developing meaningful relationships with the senior offshore executives, than about being amazed at the offshore capabilities, some of which you will never need. So the trip becomes much more applicable to your needs and more valuable.

If you are going to India, another big point to consider is what category of vendors you should visit. I always select both tier 1 and tier 2 vendors in the final mix of companies to visit. A tier 1 vendor may have 70,000 staff, and a very broad portfolio of capabilities, whereas a tier 2 vendor may only have 9,000 staff and fewer people in each capability, BUT, with a tier 2 vendor your company will be a big fish in a small pool, and with a tier 1 vendor, you may be a small fish in a big pool. The treatment and focus you receive from a tier 2 vendor may far exceed what you will receive from a tier 1 vendor, and a tier 2 vendor will be very willing to expand their capability in your technology just for the purpose of serving you.

I saw a great example of this first-hand on a trip to Chennai, India. I went with a client who wanted to have support of less than a hundred offshore engineers in an old technology. The tier 2 vendor was willing to take people out of university and retrain them in the old technology. As I have come to expect with offshore vendors, they treated us like kings and really rolled out the red carpet. The senior executives (who I had already met in onshore) gave up time with their families over India’s national holidays so that they could show us around the tourist sites near Chennai. They did everything possible to take good care of us. By comparison, the tier 1 vendor (whose name you would recognize) did not greet us with a red carpet. The senior executives were only present over video link, and we were subjected to a 45 minute bag search both entering and leaving the premises, where they insisted on recording the serial numbers on all of our equipment. They seemed to think that as senior executives, we might steal something! I felt insulted and did not hesitate to publicly tell them so.

As you might expect, the tier 2 vendor got the business, and leveraging the relationships with the senior executives, this has been running successfully ever since.