Handing a comparison to Verinode Advisory

What this is

Verinode Advisory is a human team, not an automated agent. Where IQ works inside the product on your behalf, Advisory is a service you can hand a specific piece of work to: sourcing new vendors, running an RFP, chasing down quotes. The line between the two shows up visually too. IQ's surfaces use the teal accent; anything from Advisory uses the burgundy token, because it is a different kind of help, a person, not a process.

Every side-by-side comparison in Verinode, vendors, equipment, and vendor ratings, ends with the same offer: a callout that reads Verinode Advisory in small burgundy caps, a one-line pitch for what the team will do with what you are looking at, and a button. Click the button and Verinode does not send you to a marketing page. It opens a small form, right there, that turns the comparison you built into a support ticket the Advisory team picks up from their queue. You never leave the product.

This article walks through that handoff end to end: where the callout lives, what the request form shows and asks, what happens the moment you submit, and what the empty and error states look like along the way.

Where to find it

There is no standalone Comparisons page in the sidebar. If you type or land on /comparisons directly, Verinode redirects you into Vendors, because comparing is a capability that lives inside the sections it belongs to, not a section of its own. You will run into the same Advisory handoff in three places:

• Vendors. Open Vendors from the sidebar. Select up to four vendors (checkboxes on the card grid or the table rows), and a floating bar pins to the bottom of the screen reading Compare N with a max 4 note beside it. Click it to open the Compare overlay.
• Equipment. The same comparison pattern, capped at four columns, opens from the Equipment section when you select multiple pieces of equipment to compare.
• Benchmarks, vendor ratings. From a benchmark category in Benchmarks, opening Compare ratings lines up peer ratings for the vendors you pick.

All three open the same kind of overlay: a labels column on the left, one column per item you are comparing on the right, and the Advisory callout sitting under the comparison grid once you have at least one item loaded.

The Advisory callout

The callout is the same shape everywhere it appears: a burgundy-tinted panel with the Verinode Advisory eyebrow, a bold one-line headline, a short explanation of what you get back, and a button on the right. The copy is tailored to what you are comparing:

• Vendors compare. Headline: "Source new vendors for me." Body: "Hand the comparison to Verinode Advisory. We'll shortlist three to five vendors against your stack profile, run the outreach, and bring quotes back with peer-grounded negotiation notes." Button: Get quotes via Advisory →
• Equipment compare. Headline: "Source replacements or recommendations from Advisory." Body: "Hand the comparison to Verinode Advisory. We'll source replacements against your operating profile, line up two to three quotes, and bring back peer-grounded specs and pricing."
• Benchmarks, vendor ratings compare. Headline: "Refine this shortlist with Advisory research." Body: "Verinode Advisory turns peer ratings and Verinode Scores into a sourcing shortlist for your operation. We run the outreach and bring back quotes."

In every case the promise is the same shape: Advisory takes what you already assembled (the exact names in the comparison), narrows a shortlist, does the outreach, and returns with quotes and notes grounded in what peers are actually paying and experiencing, not a generic vendor list.

The button is disabled if the comparison is empty. In the Vendors and Equipment overlays specifically, clicking it does nothing if there is nothing loaded in the columns yet, since there is nothing meaningful to hand off.

What clicking the button does

Clicking the callout's button opens Send to Verinode Advisory, a compact form that stacks on top of the comparison overlay. It has three parts.

1. 1The context panel. A burgundy-tinted block repeats the same headline you saw on the callout (for example, "Hand this comparison to Verinode Advisory.") and adds the mechanics in plain language: "Submitting opens a ticket and notifies the Advisory team at advisory@verinode.ai. They'll reply within one business day."
2. 2The item list. A section labeled by what you are comparing, "vendors in this request," "equipment in this request," or "vendor ratings in this request", followed by a numbered list of the exact names pulled straight from your comparison. This list is read-only. You cannot edit or remove a name here; if you want a different set of items, close the form, adjust your comparison, and reopen it.
3. 3The optional note. A text box labeled "What would you like the Advisory team to do? (optional)," capped at 2,000 characters, with a placeholder example: "e.g. Source three alternatives in the $X-Y/mo range, run outreach, bring back quotes." Use it to add anything the item list alone does not say: a budget range, a timeline, a specific pain point with the current vendor.

Two buttons sit at the bottom: Cancel (closes the form without sending anything) and Send request. Send request stays disabled while nothing is loaded in the comparison (there is nothing to hand off) and while a request is in flight, so you cannot double-submit.

What happens after you submit

Submitting does two things at once, both server-side:

• It opens an in-app support ticket. The ticket is created under your operator account with category "Other," priority "Normal," and its source flagged as in-app, so the Advisory team can immediately see it came from a comparison inside the product rather than an inbound email. The subject line is built for scanning in their queue, something like "Advisory: source alternatives for vendors, [names of the first few items], +N more" if your comparison ran past three items.
• It emails the Advisory mailbox. The email carries your company name, your numbered item list, and your optional note, and is set up so a reply from the Advisory team lands back in your inbox directly. If that notification email fails to send for any reason, the ticket itself still lands in the queue; a dropped email never loses your request.

The form then flashes a confirmation in place: "Request sent. The Advisory team will reach out shortly." At that point the Send request button disappears and Cancel becomes Close, since there is nothing left to do but close the form.

If something goes wrong on submit, the same spot shows an error instead, either the specific problem or a fallback: "Couldn't send the request. Try again or email advisory@verinode.ai directly." You can retry immediately, or reach the team the old-fashioned way if the in-app path is having trouble.

Once a ticket is open, you can see that it exists from Settings. The Support row under Settings shows how many tickets you have open; a request sent from a comparison counts toward that total the moment it lands.

Empty states

• Nothing loaded in the comparison yet. If you open Vendors or Equipment compare before selecting anything, the overlay shows a picker instead of a grid, with the line "Nothing available to compare yet." when there is genuinely nothing to add. The Advisory callout only becomes clickable once at least one item is in the comparison.
• No items in the request form. If the request form somehow opens with an empty comparison, the item list reads "(no items selected)" in italic, and Send request stays disabled, there is nothing for Advisory to work from until you add something to compare.
• No note added. Leaving the optional text box blank is a normal path, not an error. Advisory still receives the item list and can follow up to ask what you are after if the names alone do not say enough.

Why this stays in the product

Verinode is an independent data trust, and Advisory's value depends on that independence: the negotiation notes it brings back are grounded in what your peers are actually experiencing, not a vendor's marketing deck. Keeping the handoff inside the compare overlay, instead of routing you out to a separate site, means the exact comparison you built, the vendors, the numbers, the ratings, travels with the request instead of you having to retype it from memory in an email. You stay in one place; the context goes with the ask.

See How benchmarks work for how the Verinode Score and peer ratings behind a comparison are built, and Reading a benchmark for what those numbers mean when you are deciding whether to hand a vendor relationship off to Advisory in the first place. For the general shape of benchmark surfaces across the platform, see Benchmarks overview.