What to Ask on an Equipment Vendor Reference Call

TL;DR

• A vendor-supplied reference is a satisfied customer who agreed to take a call. That is not a problem to solve, it is a constraint to work with by asking questions a happy customer can still answer honestly.
• Ask about process, not satisfaction. How long did onboarding take, what went wrong, what did they do about it. Those have answers. Whether they are happy does not tell you anything.
• The most useful question in the whole call is what they wish they had known before signing, and almost nobody asks it.
• Find one reference yourself. A company the vendor did not choose is worth three that it did, and finding one is easier than most people assume.
• Thirty minutes is enough and forty-five is better. A reference call scheduled for fifteen minutes gets the sales answer.
• Write it up the same day against the same questions for every reference, or you will remember impressions rather than evidence.

The reference call that confirmed everything and found nothing

A 280-person company ran three reference calls before signing an equipment vendor. All three went well. All three customers were positive. The notes afterwards said things like good communication, responsive account team and no major issues.

Eight months later the company hit a problem the references could have predicted. Retrieval in two of their markets was slow, the vendor's partner arrangement there had changed twice in a year, and the process when a collection failed involved a sequence of handoffs that took weeks.

Going back over the notes, nobody had asked about retrieval specifically. The calls had covered onboarding, the portal, the account relationship and general satisfaction. Retrieval had come up once, in the phrasing "how has the retrieval side been", and the answer had been "fine, no complaints", which is what somebody says about a thing they have not had much of.

Recommended Tools

Best tools for HR Operations

B BambooHR HR management system R Rippling HR & IT automation W Workday Enterprise HRIS

View all recommended tools

The references were honest. The questions were the problem. Three good conversations had produced a general impression and no information about the specific thing that later went wrong.

When reference calls are not worth the time

The commitment is small and reversible. If you can leave after a quarter with no penalty, running three reference calls is more process than the decision deserves. Sign, measure, leave if it is wrong.

You already have the vendor elsewhere in the business. Your own colleagues in another region or another function are a better reference than any stranger, and they will tell you things a customer never would.

The vendor is very new. A company with six customers cannot give you a representative reference, and the ones they can give you are early adopters with an unusual relationship. That is not disqualifying, but reference calls will not help you assess it.

You have not defined what you care about. A reference call without specific questions produces general reassurance. If you do not yet know what your risks are, spend the time working that out instead; the call will be far more useful afterwards.

Working with the fact that references are curated

Every vendor-supplied reference is a customer who is happy enough to take the call and was selected for that reason. Treating that as dishonesty is the wrong frame, and so is treating the reference as independent verification.

What a curated reference can still tell you, reliably: how long things took, what the process actually looked like, what went wrong and how it was handled, and what they would do differently. Those are factual and a happy customer has no reason to misrepresent them.

What a curated reference will not tell you: whether this vendor is the right choice, whether they considered leaving, or what the weaknesses are in general terms. Questions framed as judgements get answers framed as judgements, and the judgement was pre-selected.

So the technique is to ask about events rather than about opinions. "Has it been good" invites a verdict. "Walk me through what happened the last time a delivery went wrong" invites a story, and stories contain detail that verdicts do not.

The second technique is to ask about things a satisfied customer would still complain about. Everybody has something. Finding it is a matter of asking narrowly enough that "it has all been fine" is not an available answer.

Finding a reference the vendor did not pick

One self-sourced reference is worth more than three supplied ones, and the effort involved is routinely overestimated.

Ask your network directly. Peers in similar companies, people in operations or IT communities, former colleagues. A short message asking whether anybody uses a particular equipment vendor usually produces at least one response, and that person has no relationship with the vendor's sales team.

Look at who the vendor names publicly. Case studies, logos on a website, conference mentions. Those companies are customers, and contacting somebody there directly is entirely normal. The person who appeared in the case study is likely a champion, but their colleague in another function may not be.

Ask the vendor for a churned customer. This sounds audacious and occasionally works. A vendor confident in their position will sometimes connect you with somebody who left, particularly if the reason was fit rather than failure, and that conversation is the single most informative one available. A vendor who reacts badly to the question has told you something too.

And ask your other vendors. Your MSP, your reseller or your existing logistics provider frequently knows who uses whom, and they have opinions. Weight those opinions for their own commercial interest, but they are a lead.

The questions that produce real answers

Twelve questions, grouped. You will not ask all of them; pick the ones matching your risks.

On getting started. How long from signature to the first device actually arriving with somebody? What did you have to provide that you had not expected? What did the data migration involve, and how long did it take? Who on your side did the work, and how much of their time did it take?

On ordinary operations. What is the typical time from your order to the person having a working machine, in your hardest market? How often does something need a conversation rather than going through? What do you still do manually that you expected not to?

On things going wrong. Tell me about the last time something went wrong. What was the resolution path, and how long did it take? Have you had a device lost or damaged, and how was that handled?

On the relationship over time. Has your account contact changed, and what happened to service when it did? How responsive are they now compared with the first three months?

And the one that matters most. What do you wish you had known before you signed? Ask it last, ask it plainly, and then stop talking. The pause is where the answer comes from, and this question produces more useful material than the other eleven combined.

Questions that waste the call

Are you happy with them? The reference was selected for the answer to this.

Would you recommend them? Same problem, and it invites a yes that forecloses the next five minutes.

What are their weaknesses? Framed as a general judgement, this gets a non-answer or a polite deflection. Ask about a specific thing instead.

How is the support? Too broad. Ask what happened last time they contacted support, and how long it took.

Do they integrate with X? The vendor can answer this and you should ask them. Reference time is too valuable for things available from the sales team.

And anything with a yes or no answer. Closed questions produce closed calls. Every question in the previous section is open deliberately, and the difference in what comes back is larger than the difference in phrasing suggests.

The shape of the call

Thirty minutes minimum, forty-five if they will give it. A fifteen-minute call produces the compressed version, which is the sales version. If the reference can only do fifteen, use it on the regret question and two others.

Open by saying what you are trying to work out. Not a sales-style preamble, a plain statement: we are considering this vendor, we are worried about retrieval and about two specific markets, and we would value your experience. That frames the conversation usefully and signals you will not waste their time.

Let them talk. The most common failure is interviewing rather than listening. Ask a question, then be quiet, including through the pause. References frequently add the most useful sentence after a silence they expected you to fill.

Ask follow-ups on the specifics. When somebody says onboarding took a while, ask how long. When they say there were some issues at the start, ask what they were. The first answer is a summary and the second is the information.

Close by asking who else you should talk to. Sometimes they will name somebody, and that person is self-sourced rather than vendor-supplied.

Matching the reference to your situation

A reference is only useful to the extent their situation resembles yours, and vendors naturally supply their most satisfied customers rather than their most similar ones.

Establish the basics early in the call so you can weight everything afterwards. How many people, in how many countries. A reference with four hundred people in two countries tells you very little if you have two hundred across twelve. How long have they been a customer. Somebody three months in can describe onboarding vividly and knows nothing about year two. What do they use it for. Procurement only, full lifecycle, retrieval heavy; these are different products in practice.

If the reference turns out to be very different from you, the call is still worth having but the useful content narrows. Ask about process and duration, which transfer, and discount everything about coverage and markets, which does not.

And if all three supplied references are substantially larger or smaller than you, that is itself a finding about where the vendor's customer base actually sits, and worth asking them about directly.

What to ask specific to equipment vendors

Generic vendor reference questions miss the things that distinguish this category, and these are worth adding.

What happens when somebody leaves and does not return the device? The single most differentiating process in this category and the one most references have genuinely experienced.

How accurate is the asset data, honestly? Phrased with the "honestly" attached, because it gives permission. Most companies have register drift and most will admit it when asked this way.

Have they changed partners in any of your markets? Partner networks shift and the customer feels it. A reference who has lived through a partner change in a market can tell you what that was like.

What is in scope that you thought was not, and vice versa? Scope boundaries in this category are genuinely confusing, particularly around repairs, disposal and storage, and misunderstandings surface months in.

And what do you still do yourselves? Every arrangement leaves some work with the customer. Knowing which work, from somebody living it, is more accurate than any statement of scope.

When a reference says something bad

It happens more than people expect, because a customer who agreed to the call six weeks ago may have had a difficult month since, and because the regret question invites candour.

Do not argue with it and do not rescue the vendor. The instinct to say "oh, they mentioned that was being improved" shuts down the only genuinely critical input you are likely to get. Let them finish, then ask for the detail.

Establish when it happened. A problem from eighteen months ago at a vendor that has since doubled in size may have been fixed, and a problem from last month almost certainly has not. The date is the most important part of a negative account.

Ask what the vendor did about it. This is where you learn the most. A vendor that acknowledged a failure, explained it and changed something is a different proposition from one that disputed it. The reference will tell you which happened, in detail, because they remember.

And ask whether they would sign again. Phrased exactly that way rather than as satisfaction. A reference who describes real problems and says yes anyway has given you a far more useful assessment than one who had no problems at all.

Then take it to the vendor. Not as an accusation and not naming the reference, but as a question: we heard about an issue of roughly this shape, can you talk us through it. How they respond is itself a reference call, and it is the one that costs you nothing to arrange.

The reference is assessing you too

Worth remembering, because it changes how the call goes and most buyers never think about it.

The person on the other end agreed to spend half an hour helping a vendor they like. They are doing a favour, they have their own job, and they will be more forthcoming with somebody who is obviously prepared than with somebody reading from a generic list.

Send the questions in advance if you want depth. Some people think better with notice, particularly on the duration questions where the honest answer requires them to check something. You lose a little spontaneity and gain accuracy.

Say how long you will take and then keep to it. A call that runs over makes the next reference less likely to happen, and vendors do hear about it.

Offer something back. Frequently the most natural thing is to answer their questions about your own situation, since you are both operating in the same space. People who have just told you about their equipment problems are often curious about yours.

And thank them properly afterwards. This sounds like manners rather than technique, and it is both, because the reference who feels well-treated is the one who answers a follow-up email three weeks later when you think of the question you should have asked.

Who should make the call

Not whoever has a free slot, and not the person who has already decided.

The person who will own the arrangement should be on the call. They will hear operational detail that a procurement-led conversation skips, because they know which details matter. A reference saying "the exception process goes through a form" means something specific to an operations person and nothing to anybody else.

Somebody sceptical should also be there. A single enthusiastic buyer running reference calls alone will hear confirmation, not because they are dishonest but because that is how people listen. A second person who is not invested asks the follow-up that the first one does not think to ask.

Procurement does not need to lead it. Reference calls run as a procurement formality produce procurement answers. The useful version is an operational conversation between two people who do the same job.

And keep it to two from your side. Three or more turns it into a panel, which makes the reference more careful and less discursive, and discursive is where the useful material lives.

Referencing an incumbent you already have

A different exercise and a neglected one. When you are deciding whether to renew rather than whether to buy, reference calls still help, and the questions change.

Ask other customers what they get that you do not. Service levels, access, responsiveness and scope vary between customers of the same vendor far more than most people assume. A reference describing a weekly check-in when you have not spoken to your account manager in five months is actionable information.

Ask what they pay, in structure rather than in figures. Most people will not share a number and many will describe the shape: per device, per movement, a subscription with a minimum. If their structure differs from yours, that is a conversation to have at renewal.

Ask whether they have renegotiated and what changed. Renewal is the moment your bargaining position is strongest, and a reference who has been through one knows what was available.

And ask what they nearly left over. Everybody with a multi-year relationship has a moment. Knowing what the vendor does when a customer is close to leaving tells you about your own options.

Your own experience is better evidence than any reference for whether the service works. What references add at renewal is a sense of whether what you are getting is what is available.

Where references fit in the process

Timing matters more than people allow for, and the common sequence wastes them.

Too early and you do not know what to ask. References taken during initial shortlisting, before you have worked out your own risks, produce general impressions. That is the version described in the story at the top of this article.

Too late and they are a formality. References run after the decision is effectively made, as a procurement checkbox, cannot change anything and everybody involved can feel it.

The useful window is after the first vendor conversations and before the pilot. By then you know what you are worried about, which makes the questions specific, and the findings can still shape the pilot design and the contract. That is the point of maximum value.

One practical consequence: ask for references later than vendors usually offer them. Sales teams tend to produce references early, as reassurance. Taking them at that point spends a limited resource on a conversation you are not yet equipped to have, and you generally only get one set.

Writing it up while you still remember

Do this the same day, against the same template for every reference, or the calls blur into a general impression and the general impression is what you will act on.

Record the facts separately from the assessment. Durations, counts and specific events on one side; your read on the other. In three weeks you will want the facts and will have stopped trusting your read.

Capture direct quotes where somebody said something precise. "Onboarding took eleven weeks, mostly our fault" is worth considerably more in a decision meeting than a note saying onboarding was slower than expected.

Note what they did not say. A reference who answers every question except the retrieval one specifically has given you a signal, and it is only visible if you are tracking the questions rather than the conversation.

And compare across references on the same questions rather than reading each write-up as a whole. Three references all describing a twelve-week onboarding is a fact about the vendor. Three references each describing a different single frustration is a fact about your own risk tolerance.

What to do with what you learn

Take the specifics back to the vendor. Not adversarially, as questions: a reference mentioned onboarding took eleven weeks, what does that look like for a company our size. A good vendor will engage with that directly and the quality of the engagement is itself evidence.

Feed the findings into the pilot design. If two references mentioned the same weak market, that market goes into your pilot. If retrieval came up repeatedly, make a real collection a pilot requirement. The reference calls and the pilot should be one exercise rather than two.

Adjust the contract where it matters. A reference who describes a scope misunderstanding tells you which clause to pin down before signing, which is considerably cheaper than discovering it the way they did.

And keep the notes. In eighteen months, when something is not working, the question of whether you were warned is a useful one, and so is the question of what the vendor said when you raised it.

Three references is a sample size of three

Worth being honest about what this method can and cannot establish, because reference calls get treated as verification when they are closer to anecdote with a high information density.

Three customers out of a vendor's base, selected by the vendor, is not a representative sample of anything. If all three say onboarding took around twelve weeks, that is reasonably strong evidence about onboarding duration, because there is no obvious reason for a selected sample to be biased on a factual question of that kind. If all three say the account team is responsive, that is almost no evidence at all, because responsiveness to a reference customer is exactly what selection would produce.

The useful distinction is between questions where selection bias operates and questions where it does not. Durations, process shapes, what the customer had to do themselves, what went wrong and when: selection barely touches these. Satisfaction, recommendation, general quality: selection determines them entirely.

So read your notes with that split in mind. The facts across three calls are worth treating as findings. The sentiment across three calls is worth treating as confirmation that the vendor can find three happy customers, which is true of almost every vendor still trading.

This is also why one self-sourced reference changes the picture so much. It is not that the person is more honest; it is that they were not selected, so their sentiment carries information that the supplied ones do not.

If the vendor will not provide references

Uncommon and informative when it happens, and the reasons vary enough to be worth distinguishing before concluding anything.

They are very new. A vendor with a handful of customers may genuinely not want to burden them, and may also be protecting relationships that are early and fragile. Reasonable, and it means the pilot has to carry more weight.

Their customers are under confidentiality. Real in some sectors, particularly where the customer's own security posture prevents them discussing suppliers. Ask whether an anonymised conversation is possible, or whether somebody will speak about process without naming their employer.

They offer a case study instead. A written case study is marketing, not a reference, and accepting it as a substitute is the mistake. Take it, read it, and still ask for a call.

They deflect without a reason. This is the one that matters. A vendor of reasonable size who will not connect you with any customer, and does not explain why, has told you something. It does not automatically disqualify them, and it should change how much weight the pilot carries and how reversible you need the first commitment to be.

In every case, the fallback is the same: self-source one reference yourself, and design a pilot that could actually fail. Those two together substitute reasonably well for a reference set you could not obtain.

Where the vendors fit

Vendor-supplied references. The default, useful when questioned properly, limited by selection. Ask for three and ask for them to be similar to you in size and footprint rather than simply positive.

Self-sourced references. Worth considerably more and easier to obtain than people expect. One is enough to change the picture.

A churned customer. The most informative conversation available and the hardest to arrange. Worth asking for.

Your own colleagues elsewhere in the business. Overlooked and frequently available. If another region already uses the vendor, that is a reference with no selection bias at all.

RemoAsset is our own product and that is disclosure rather than a footnote. It covers procurement and retrieval across 80+ countries and publishes a Subscription tier from $1,499 a year. If you are referencing us, the questions worth pressing hardest are the ones where we would rather you heard it from a customer than from our site: ask about coverage depth in your specific markets rather than the country count, because that varies; ask what they use for endpoint management, since we enrol devices but are not an MDM in our own right; and ask how they handle formal disposal evidence, because we wipe devices but are not a certified ITAD and some customers need a separate provider for that. Those three are where the misunderstandings happen and a reference will describe them more usefully than we can.

The decision table

A worked example of one answer, and what to do with it

Abstract advice about asking better questions is easier to agree with than to use, so here is one exchange and the three follow-ups it should produce.

You ask what happened the last time a delivery went wrong. The reference says: a laptop went missing somewhere in transit to one of our people in Portugal, it took about three weeks to sort out, and in the end they shipped a replacement.

That answer contains four things worth pulling on.

Three weeks to sort out, or three weeks until the person had a machine? These are very different and the phrasing usually hides which. Ask directly. If the employee waited three weeks to start working, that is a severity the summary did not convey.

Who chased it? If the reference's own team spent three weeks following up, the vendor's process did not handle it; a person did. That is the distinction between a service and a relationship, and it predicts what happens when your account contact is busy.

Was it the vendor or the partner? Portugal may well be partner-served. If the delay sat with a third party, the question becomes what visibility the vendor had and how quickly they could escalate into their own supply chain.

And has it happened since? One incident eighteen months ago is noise. One incident that recurs quarterly is a pattern, and the reference will know which it is.

Four follow-ups, perhaps ninety seconds, converting a vague anecdote into something you can take to the vendor and put in a pilot. That is what the whole method amounts to: not cleverer opening questions, just refusing to accept the first summary.

What getting this wrong actually costs

The visible cost is three wasted half-hours, which is nothing.

The real cost is a false sense of verification. Three positive reference calls create confidence, and confidence makes a decision harder to revisit later. The company in the story at the top of this article did not merely fail to learn about retrieval; it acquired a belief that it had done its diligence, and that belief delayed recognition of the problem by months.

The cost with the longest tail is the question you could have asked for free. Reference calls are the cheapest form of due diligence available in this category, because somebody who has already made your decision is willing to tell you how it went. Not asking the specific questions means paying later for information that was available in thirty minutes.

So the question is not whether the references were positive. It is whether any answer in those calls could have changed your mind, because if not, you held three conversations that confirmed what you already intended to do.

When references stop being the right instrument

For a first vendor in this category, reference calls are among the most valuable things you can do, because you do not yet know what the failure modes look like and somebody else does.

They become less useful in two situations. When you have run this arrangement before, with a different vendor, you already know what to watch for and your own experience is better evidence than a stranger's. And when your situation is genuinely unusual, references in ordinary situations cannot speak to it, and the pilot is where the answer has to come from.

They also stop being useful when they become a formality. A procurement process that requires three reference calls will produce three reference calls, and if nobody has defined what those calls need to establish, they will produce three pleasant conversations and a tick in a box.

The test is simple: before the call, write down what answer would make you reconsider. If you cannot name one, the call is theatre, and the time is better spent designing a pilot that can actually fail.

Frequently asked questions

Where this leaves you

A reference call is cheap diligence that most companies run as a formality.

Ask about events rather than opinions, because a curated reference can describe what happened honestly even when their verdict was pre-selected. Add the five equipment-specific questions. Find one reference the vendor did not choose. Give the call thirty minutes and let the silences run. Ask what they wish they had known, last, and then stop talking.

Then write it up the same day, and before the next call, write down the answer that would change your mind.

If you do only two things from this article, make them these. Ask what they wish they had known before signing, last, and sit through the pause. And refuse to accept the first summary of any incident, because the summary is always shorter and kinder than what happened, and the detail underneath it is the entire value of the call.

Everything else here is elaboration on those two.