Why Vendor Independence Actually Wins More Deals
I spent the first half of my career working for vendors. Good ones — Palo Alto Networks, Imperva, Tenable. I believed in the products. I knew them deeply. And I was good at selling them.
But there was always a ceiling. Customers could sense it, even when they couldn't name it. You'd be in a room with a CISO who'd already been pitched by three other vendors that week, and something in their posture said: here comes another one.
The moment I went independent, that changed.
The Structural Problem with Vendor-Side Advice
When you represent a vendor, your incentive and your customer's incentive are only aligned up to a point. The product fits, or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you don't say so — at least not loudly. You find the angle.
Customers know this. They've been burned. They've bought platforms that solved one problem and created three others. They've signed multi-year contracts for tools their team never fully adopted. They're not cynical, but they're careful.
What they actually want — and almost never ask for directly — is someone who will tell them the uncomfortable truth before the purchase order, not after.
That's the gap vendor-independent consulting fills. And it's a gap that's surprisingly large.
What Changes When You Drop the Quota
The first thing you notice is how much easier conversations become. You're not steering toward a close. You're steering toward the right answer. Those are very different navigations.
In practice this means:
- Sometimes recommending a competitor's product because it genuinely fits better
- Telling a prospect their existing tool is underused, not in need of replacement
- Scoping down a project rather than up, because the smaller version is what will actually succeed
- Being honest about integration complexity that a vendor's SE would have glossed over
This sounds like it would cost you business. In the short term, occasionally it does. In the medium term, it compounds. Clients remember who told them the truth when it wasn't in their own interest to do so.
The DACH Market Specifically
The DACH region has a particular relationship with this. German and Austrian enterprise buyers are thorough in a way that I have deep respect for. They will run a proof-of-value for six months. They will ask the same question four different ways to check for consistency. They read the fine print.
In this environment, being caught steering — even subtly — is disproportionately costly. Trust, once lost, rarely comes back. But trust earned is also stickier than elsewhere. A client who believes you're genuinely on their side becomes a long-term relationship and a strong reference.
The consultants and presales engineers who thrive in DACH are almost always the ones who treat technical accuracy as non-negotiable, even when it's uncomfortable.
It Doesn't Mean Being Vendor-Agnostic
Independence isn't the same as having no opinions. I have strong views about what works. I've seen Palo Alto's NGFW outperform the competition in complex enterprise environments more times than I can count. I've seen SASE consolidation projects fail badly when the underlying network wasn't ready. I know which vulnerability management tools actually get used post-deployment and which ones gather dust.
Those opinions are valuable precisely because they're not tied to a commission structure. When I recommend something, people know why.
The irony is that going independent made me better at what vendor-side presales actually requires: building trust quickly and helping someone make a decision they'll still feel good about two years later. The quota just wasn't helping with either of those things.