When is this better value than an outside partner?

For narrow, product-specific work: a configuration nobody can get right, an unexplained behaviour, a connection that will not hold. Their advantage over any outside firm is largest there, and the conflict of interest is smallest, because the question being asked is how rather than whether.

What should we not use them for?

Deciding whether the tool fits the problem, and changing how a team works around it. The first asks them to argue against their employer, and the second is outside what they are equipped or paid to do, so both produce a disappointing engagement.

How should included days be handled?

Find out how many there are and decide in advance what they are for. Days attached to a licence get consumed by whatever arises first unless somebody has reserved them, and the task that most needed the vendor's specific knowledge is rarely the one that arrives earliest.

Glossary

Professional services

Paid help from the vendor's own team, which knows the product better than anyone and has a stake in what you conclude about it.

In plain terms

Hiring the people who make the thing to help you use the thing. Nobody knows the product better, which is the whole appeal, and nobody has less reason to tell you it is the wrong product, which is the whole limitation.

Why it matters

Because it is usually the fastest route to a working setup and the least reliable source of advice about whether the setup should exist. Both of those are true at once, and treating the engagement as one or the other is where organisations get poor value from something that could have been excellent.

How it works

Their product knowledge is genuinely unmatched and worth paying for. They know the undocumented behaviour, the configuration everybody gets wrong and the limitation that will matter in month four, and none of that is available from anybody else at any price.

The question they cannot answer well is whether you should be doing this at all. Asking a vendor's team whether their product suits your problem is asking somebody to argue against their own employer, and even entirely honest people are poor at that because they see the successful cases and not the abandoned ones.

It is frequently bundled into a purchase, which obscures what it costs and what it covers. Days included with a licence look free and are priced somewhere, and a buyer who does not know how many are included tends to use them for whatever comes up first rather than for the thing that most needed expertise.

The scope tends to be narrow by construction and that is reasonable. They will make their product work and are neither equipped nor obliged to fix the process around it, so an engagement expecting broader change is buying from the wrong kind of supplier.

For a narrow, well-defined task it is usually the best value available. Configuring something specific, resolving a behaviour nobody can explain, or getting a connection working are exactly the jobs where their advantage is largest and the conflict of interest is smallest.

Where their advantage is largest

Framing this as a position rather than a character issue matters, because the usual version of this advice sounds like a warning about salespeople and produces the wrong response, which is discounting everything they say. The people delivering these engagements are frequently excellent and candid, and they will tell you plainly that a configuration is a bad idea or that a feature does not do what the website implies. What they cannot do is see the cases where somebody chose a different category of product and was better off, because those people are not their customers and never became a story anybody at the vendor heard. Their sample is missing exactly the evidence the right-hand column needs. The practical consequence is that both columns can be pursued in the same week from different sources at no extra cost, and organisations that do this get a better result than those that pick a side. Use the vendor hard for the left, deliberately and with the questions written down in advance, and take the right-hand column somewhere with no stake in the answer.

Seen in the wild

Vendor days used to configure a deployment properly rather than to debate whether to have one.
ChatGPT
Bringing in the vendor's team to resolve connector behaviour nobody internally can explain.
Glean
Included setup days spent on the first thing that came up rather than the thing that needed expertise.
Make

Common misconceptions

People assume

They are the best people to advise on strategy.

In fact

They are the best people to advise on their product. Whether the product is the right answer is a question they are structurally poorly placed to consider, and that holds even when everybody involved is entirely honest.

People assume

Included days are free.

In fact

They are priced into the purchase and are finite. Not knowing how many there are usually means spending them on whatever arose first, which is rarely the task where the vendor's specific knowledge was most valuable.

Questions

When is this better value than an outside partner?: For narrow, product-specific work: a configuration nobody can get right, an unexplained behaviour, a connection that will not hold. Their advantage over any outside firm is largest there, and the conflict of interest is smallest, because the question being asked is how rather than whether.
What should we not use them for?: Deciding whether the tool fits the problem, and changing how a team works around it. The first asks them to argue against their employer, and the second is outside what they are equipped or paid to do, so both produce a disappointing engagement.
How should included days be handled?: Find out how many there are and decide in advance what they are for. Days attached to a licence get consumed by whatever arises first unless somebody has reserved them, and the task that most needed the vendor's specific knowledge is rarely the one that arrives earliest.