I've come from your perspective before to customers (talk about the pain points, focus upon problem-resolution fit not tech, etc.) and it's awful hard to tell c

I've come from your perspective before to customers (talk about the pain points, focus upon problem-resolution fit not tech, etc.) and it's awful hard to tell customers that have 80% of costs being related to labor and have reasonably well-performing technology that when they're talking to you only because you're trying to cut costs directly in your SOW it can be frustrating when touching that 80% is completely off limits and a political landmine. Almost all the big vendors and sales teams start with the approach of looking for problems and trying to re-message their products and services to appeal to the problems of their C-level customers, not the engineers (whom never make the vendor relationship decisions). Several years ago everyone was "cloud-washing" their products to tell CIOs "oh yes Mr. CTO, we're ready for your cloud initiative" by slapping on a web frontend to their managed services and boxed software when they didn't have anything before to maintain a relationship. Those are red herring projects though I've found - it's just another way to keep vendors on their toes. Another problem is that accurate problem statements can be very hard to get to without escalating to higher level managers that it turns out are oftentimes swayed by existing vendor relationships to get something done more effectively. From here, I simply have to ask "are you happy with the results your vendors have promised compared to what you expected?" and everyone complains about cost but you need to get away from that conversation honestly if possible - because IT at a company will never, ever, ever cost too little since it's a cost center.