Right before my holiday I have made a bad experience. Some meetings with a vendor have gone sub-optimal to say the least.There were several road blocks and nit-picking details which brought the meetings close to waste of time.

However it was a good opportunity to observe what could be done much more better when talking with vendors for technical problems. I have run a lot of such talks and I wanted to take this bad situation as trigger to collect my 5 hacks to get the most out of vendor discussions.