Would you buy a used car without popping the hood? I mean, no test drive, no mechanic, just a shoddy paint job and a sales pitch?
Well, that’s what the industry expects to do with technology right now. Move fast, trust the pitch, figure out the rest later.
What the shoddy paint job looks like in a tech sale. The demo that runs on the vendor’s clean data. The reference customer who’s ten times your size and runs nothing else you run. The pricing sheet that shows per seat but not per integration, per migration, per hour of professional services. “AI” underpinning every service or product in the deck.
Fine. None of this is fraud. It’s just a sales presentation doing its job. But there has to be measureable benefit to buying. You have to be solving problems.
The reason this happens is that we, as an industry, don’t think of a bad outcome like a plane crash. We think about bad outcomes as something we can ignore and hope nobody will notice.
Aviation has a black box. Software doesn’t.
When a plane goes down, nobody gets to say “that was a one-off, don’t worry about it.”
When a rollout fails, what happens? The customer eats the cost. The vendor calls it a bad fit or a change management problem. There’s no report, no root cause, nothing anyone else can learn from. The next buyer walks into the same sale with the same information the last one had, which is none.
That’s the consequence gap. It isn’t that people in tech are careless. It’s that the industry never built a mechanism that makes carelessness expensive for the seller. Risk sits entirely on the buyer, and the buyer is the one person in the transaction who doesn’t know what to look for.
You Need a Pre-Sale Inspection
You’d ask for one if you were buying a car, right?
How about:
- “Where does my data live and how do I get it out?”
- “Who answers the phone at 2am and are they employed by the vendor or a call center?”
- “What breaks in my current stack when this goes in? What’s the renewal term and the notice window?”
- “Show me a customer my size in my industry. What does year three cost, not year one?”
An owner can ask all of these but most won’t, because they don’t know what to ask. GABN fills that gap.
And sure “Inspection slows us down.” But so does ripping out a system in month eighteen. Two weeks of diligence against two years of workaround is not a close call. That’s the real time saver.
Interested in having us look under the hood before you drive off the lot?
