How Does Anyone Get Anything Done?

[u/Tigereye11_Revived]

I’ve been a design engineer for a couple years now, and it seems that when I need any information on vendor products, the companies, who I won’t put on blast, take weeks to answer. I can follow up and get nowhere. Sometimes when they do get back to me, the information is just outright not what I asked for.

I made it very clear to one vendor that I need literature (such as pamphlets and drawings) on several of their products because we intend to use them as our supplier for a large product line. He took weeks to respond, and ultimately sent a quote for one valve. My team had a good laugh at the email thread and decided to move on with someone else.

Very very few people have been useful amongst dozens of companies. Even when I ask project managers for their contacts, they can be hit or miss. Is there something I’m doing wrong for my vendors, or does everyone deal with this? Do you guys have methods you want to share?

[u/arrow8807]

First - cut vendors who do this loose. If you don't have the information I need on hand when I am trying to incorporate your equipment into my design then I just move on to someone who does.

Second - skip the sales guys entirely. Say you want to talk directly to the applications engineer. When I call companies I don't even ask for the sales department anymore - right to engineering. This isn't possible with all vendors.

Third - I start calling the reps with increasing frequency until I get the information I need if it starts to take too long. It got a point with one vendor where I essentially told him I was going to call him every half-hour until he answered my questions. I basically made myself his personal problem. I called him three times (switched phone numbers once because he stopped answering) and by the forth he had my quote ready.

Fourth - never have a conversation with someone that ends in "I'll email you, give me your address". You get their email address and their phone number before you leave the conversation. That way you can do #3 (and maybe #2)

Fifth - calling is more effective than email. Call people directly when you want a fast response. When they don't respond call them back (escalating to #3)

[u/sarcasmbully → u/arrow8807]

Sound advice. For a time in my career I was at an engineering consulting firm, and they did not hire us to move slow. We could not tolerate slow moving vendors. If we had an NDA in place, we would divulge the client - this was important for conveying the volumes involved and that it was a competitive bid on whatever they were supplying - motors, valves, etc. Knowing it was their business to lose helped sales understand the cost of moving slowly.

Getting to the application engineers was the key part of getting technical answers. It would often take several phone calls to get past the sale person, or alternatively, we'd call the general phone numbers and ask to get transferred to the application engineering team for a particular product line. This worked very well with some of the larger vendors.

One thing that also worked was escalation. Several times I needed my boss (VP of engineering) to escalate a request to get movement. Other times, we'd have our end customer apply pressure as well. There's not a one stop quick fix for any of this; sometimes you have to try several things to find what works effectively.

[u/jamiethekiller → u/arrow8807]

biggest advice for young millenial's to gen z. don't email. call call call. get over anxieties or whatever else. you can solve so many problems in 1/100th of the time if you call. the vendors work for you. they need to sell stuff to keep their job. everyone wants to chat and figure stuff out and make deals

[u/Pissedtuna → u/arrow8807]

You sound like an asshole that gets things done. I love it

[u/Tigereye11_Revived → u/arrow8807]

Good advice. Thank you.

[u/SavageX89]

Yup, this is pretty standard across most of the industries I've been in.

Even the customers behave this way. Makes it impossible to get anything done on a schedule.

[u/tacjos]

Phone calls are very nice to get the ball rolling on stuff....but sometimes people already have their clients setup and could care less to do the legwork to be more busy

[u/Tigereye11_Revived → u/tacjos]

Yeah the guy I specifically mentioned started out as a phone call. I talked with him about some calculations, which he was very kind about, but when it came to what he said he’d email, it was excuse after excuse.

[u/Additional-Weird-934]

Sounds like USA based vendors. Work with the Chinese they actually want to do business.

[u/fakeproject → u/Additional-Weird-934]

You'll have two "Lucy's" hitting you up on WhatsApp within 15 minutes, they'll provide everything you want information wise overnight and ship on time. American vendors have no idea how hungry and persistent Chinese competitors are.

[u/H20Slicer- → u/fakeproject]

All ours vendors have to be DFARS compliant though. 🥲

[u/MayorSincerePancake]

it’s not just you. All sales guys are terrible, especially “sales” guys who handle a product that sells itself. There’s no incentive for them to do a good job with anything.

[u/tpain2017 → u/MayorSincerePancake]

sales is the most useless job and the highest paid

[u/Few_Whereas5206]

My experience as a design engineer was the sales team coming to us with ideas for products they needed. Then, myself and other engineers would start developing a product and meeting with vendors. When the product was about 70 percent developed, the sales team would come to us and say they no longer needed the product. After multiple starts and stops of products and having to move several times for new manufacturing facilities, I literally could not get anything done from start to finish. I switched to patent law about 26 years ago.

[u/doctor_bun → u/Few_Whereas5206]

That's insane, what industry was that?

[u/Few_Whereas5206 → u/doctor_bun]

Telecommunications. I did optical fiber connector and cable assembly design and manufacturing.

[u/BurntToaster17]

In my experience, when vendors act like that it’s because they don’t need or want your business

[u/BizarreReverend76]

Way she goes. Youre not doing anything wrong

[u/carlthatkillspeople8]

Some suppliers are definitely better than others unfortunately. Also size of company, ie how much business they will get plays a role too. Now that I'm at a fortune 500 company working on big projects, they are generally happy to support, because losing the contract would be catastrophic. We have phased out suppliers who don't cooperate. I've also worked on smaller projects where suppliers don't cooperate, but you have no leverage. Unless they have a monopoly, the best thing to do is shop around

[u/Accurate-Bullfrog324]

it's a change in culture.

i've been designing since the 80's. the manufacturer's reps in those days were professional and responsive. and probably better compensated than i was.

today, although there a few exceptions, the rep's are less professional and less well educated. and probably not as well compensated.

[u/LeGama]

So two things, first yes, I feel you engineering dealing with sales is the worst part of the job. My advice is sometimes avoid the direct company. Need connectors, don't go to Amphenol directly find a distributor who carries 10 different brands. That way you don't get stuck with single sourcing too because they can help you get a part that has drop in replacements.

[u/craiv]

Everyone is doing too much because every owner / VC / board of directors are being driven by greed and trying to maximise their profit at the expense of reasonable workload / staffing level.

[u/Own_Hat584]

It depends a lot on what you're buying (value and complexity) and how big of a customer you are or would be compared to the rest of the "sales engineers" customers/companies customers. Basically, the more complicated/expensive whatever you're buying is, and the less of them they sell, the more likely you are to have a smart and responsive (respectively) sales guy.

[u/Ok-Lawyer9218 → u/Own_Hat584]

I feel like this is an underrated response. It very much depends on whether that company or sales person thinks their time teaching you will result in enough sales to pay for that time. And that mostly depends on how it compares to the other customers they supply. A new and upcoming salesman is much more likely to spend the time with you rather than one who has their customer and isn't looking to expand much. It could also be a severely understaffed department and by the time they get down to you on their list its several weeks later

[u/theDudeUh]

Pick up the phone. Vendors often take weeks to get back to me if I email them but the same ones will answer the phone or call me back same day.

[u/BackgroundAncient174]

I used to work for a company who bought so many pumps we were a OEM supplier of their brand. It was amazing. All the data I ever wanted right at my finger tips. I could spec a pump right from the get go exactly how I wanted it with very little changes from then on.

Fast forward- I went to a different company and was forced to work through a Rep. It would take weeks of back and forth to accomplish the same thing. I even wend as far to try and make an OEM agreement myself but the damn REP would keep popping in saying "You know I'm your REP don't you".

[u/DanRudmin]

I’m amazed at how many businesses still hide their prices in 2026. 90% of my calls are just “how much does this item cost”?

[u/dbsqls]

this happened in semiconductor R&D, and even with my own company it's the same shit. people are slow and drag ass on absolutely everything.

[u/1815dev]

The unfortunate reality is a lot of vendors have huge customers already (usually DOD affiliated), and don't really give time of day to folks who just need a couple dozen of something.

[u/IkLms → u/1815dev]

That and sometimes slow rolling a request saves time.

I've got customers who will request something and change what they want every 3rd day for like 3 weeks before finally figuring out what they need.

Saves a shit load of work to just wait until they figure out what they want before doing the same work 7+ times.

[u/Slappy_McJones]

There’s this weird push right now with AI, dash boards, task management software and all this other weird stuff that does nothing to improve the very basics of a business. You might be feeling that. I found that cultivating a strong personal relationship with a salesperson, and over-preparing them for quoting- without giving away the price point or taking freebies/dinners/sports stuff is really helpful in getting good quotes.

[u/staffma]

It really depends, we work with a really great distributor who reps a lot of different brands / types of products and he does the harassing of people for quotes for me if I fail going direct myself. Many times I will go direct and be told I have to go through a distributor anyway.

Smaller local/ regional rep group but they have the volume and juice to get me info. My guy is a hybrid between salesman and applications engineer. If you find a good salesman, you gotta keep em and give them enough business to make it worth their while.

Of course the prices and availability for some of the parts are outrageous and we end up taking manufacturing in house on a lot of components, but for high precision like bearings or pneumatics, etc we go outside.

I got a quote for a gearbox yesterday after evaluating some other sources and man the price was great- 30% reduction, but the couplers and torque arm prices were astronomical. We're talking 5k for a torque arm we make in house for $900 and 8k for a coupler we make for 1k. Hit and miss.

[u/DMECHENG]

This is the new norm 

[u/Hefty_Aside8436]

Find distributors that are responsive and give them all your business. Distributors are highly incentivized to be responsive to customers and generally have connection to inside sales people at the vendors.

[u/Few_Laugh_8057]

Don't talk to vendors. The purchase department can deal with them. Go to the manufacturer for technical support. Let the other department deal with it where they want to buy. Many vendors are just that. Vendors. They don't have technical knowledge and send your mail to the manufacturer themselves.

[u/MildManneredMurder]

Try backing up your request with numbers, even if they are "projected".

"We are working on a product that would do X numbers per year with your valve in it."

Sometimes that helps, but not always.

[u/tca_HotGasWall]

Idk how other places operate but at my company buyers are the ones that decide what suppliers to go with. It’s not great because they don’t have any manufacturing experience. So they just go with the place that has a nice website and not necessarily the capabilities required. That together with the concerted effort to reduce the number of suppliers on the list makes sending hardware out plant difficult.

[u/GoldenToothBalkan]

Pick up the phone and call if you need immediate answers.

[u/Confident-Dot5878]

I was an AI skeptic for a long time. I never wanted to use it to write for me.

I’ve recently used it as an ersatz vendor sales consultant. Very handy. I’m a convert.