Oh Good Lord, Vendors

Compliance vendors, we need to talk. I can appreciate that selling compliance software is a challenging job, and sales reps need to be creative when trying to reach their compliance officers targets — but do we really need to be clogging companies’ whistleblower programs with product pitches? 

That, apparently, is the complaint of the week from compliance officers. It was sparked by Mary Shirley, chief compliance officer at ScionHealth, who vented on LinkedIn that she’s exasperated with product pitches that arrive via email addresses specifically dedicated to internal reporting hotlines. Given that those email addresses are roughly equivalent to a corporate 911 number, meant for issues of misconduct that need attention, dropping a sales pitch into that mix “is not a genius way to get in front of ethics and compliance practitioners.”

A flock of compliance professionals soon replied with various versions of “Amen, sister!” 

• “1,000 percent… It’s even worse when they send the same pitches to data security, CISO, and other dedicated emails.”
• “100 percent. And the number of suppliers who do this is surprising.”
• “I get the most ridiculous things that have nothing to do with compliance no matter how I try to pretzel logic it. It’s just laziness and they land in ‘block sender’.”
• “This is occurring much too frequently.”

And my personal favorite, “THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.”

I had no idea this was a thing, but apparently it is. Some compliance officers soon told me they encounter five, ten, or even 20 product pitches via their hotline email addresses every week.

Several compliance vendors chimed into the conversation too, mostly to say that they are shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that sales reps would use such tactics. (One also mentioned that if you’re unhappy with your legacy vendor, please call her for a product demo. Sliding a product pitch into a thread griping about product pitches: you have to applaud the audacity, really.) 

In fairness, we should recognize that software vendors have a tough job. Nobody answers the phone any more, and even if you do get a compliance officer on the line, their typical objective is to get off the call immediately because they have 100 other issues that need attention. Physical mail is nearly useless because it’s so expensive given the low likelihood of reply from a recipient. So email probably is the most practical way for a sales rep to show the boss that, hey, at least you’re trying to make your outbound call quota.

One person noted that “sales people especially will use whatever public information is out there,” which is a fair point. The solution, he said, is to post an email address for procurement pitches — which is correct in theory, but in practice those addresses get so overwhelmed with inbound sales pitches that nobody answers those emails either. So the sales rep is right back to scrambling for any entry point into the compliance function that he or she can find. 

Then again, compliance officers aren’t wrong when they say that internal reporting addresses are intended for reports of misconduct, not external submissions from a sales rep singing the praises of his or her employer’s latest offering. 

I have no good answer to this predicament. It’s yet another example of our hyper-automated world turning what had previously been person-to-person interactions into a numbers game that people put on autopilot; run the process at sufficiently large scale, and you just might score a win amid the oceans of e-fluff swamping the rest of our existence. (Am I the only one who just had online dating pop into their head upon reading those words?)

Anyway, that is today’s dispatch from the front lines of corporate compliance. Here’s hoping everyone finds their match in the end.