Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Software Vendor Sales Folks are EVIL!
In the short two days this week, my phone rang a total of twenty-six times with a stupid sales person on the other end attempting to pitch their so-called value proposition...
There is a formula to the pitch, the dog and pony show. Everyone has been indoctrinated into thinking their product somehow has features that we must absolutely consider. If this was the case, why aren't they apparent to us folks on the other end?
If there were one think that would increase the productivity of enterprise architecture teams, it would be the banning of sales folks from software vendor companies calling us about their issues. Imagine if enterprises figured out that they should only take calls from software vendors, say the last Friday of every month, would productivity go up?
An even bigger drain on productivity is win these clowns start calling my peers. What of course happens is that my peers want me to be successful and either forward along information in an email which helps exceed my inbox quota and I can't get done communication that needs to occur before this gets moved to the deleted items or they will want to engage me in a conversation about what they have heard. I don't mind talking with my peers about cool things but in all reality it is somewhat painful to have the same conversation mulitiple times.
Maybe I should task the vendors on how not to bother me so that I can focus on the real problem at hand. One technique that I use which is both good and evil is that I have started asking five questions in which not a single sales person ever seems to know the answer to. They are:
Anyway, I have decided to re-double my efforts within my own enterprise to start evangelizing open source and will do so not because of cost or even quality of solution but so that I don't have to be irritated by sales people and the frustration they bring...
| | View blog reactionsThere is a formula to the pitch, the dog and pony show. Everyone has been indoctrinated into thinking their product somehow has features that we must absolutely consider. If this was the case, why aren't they apparent to us folks on the other end?
If there were one think that would increase the productivity of enterprise architecture teams, it would be the banning of sales folks from software vendor companies calling us about their issues. Imagine if enterprises figured out that they should only take calls from software vendors, say the last Friday of every month, would productivity go up?
An even bigger drain on productivity is win these clowns start calling my peers. What of course happens is that my peers want me to be successful and either forward along information in an email which helps exceed my inbox quota and I can't get done communication that needs to occur before this gets moved to the deleted items or they will want to engage me in a conversation about what they have heard. I don't mind talking with my peers about cool things but in all reality it is somewhat painful to have the same conversation mulitiple times.
Maybe I should task the vendors on how not to bother me so that I can focus on the real problem at hand. One technique that I use which is both good and evil is that I have started asking five questions in which not a single sales person ever seems to know the answer to. They are:
- I understand you can probably produce research briefs from large analyst firms. Could you tell me when was the last time you briefed industry analyst firms such as Redmonk, The Burton Group, Nemertes, etc
- Please send me the URL to the blog of your CTO
- Could you tell me not what open source projects your product contains, but which ones your company contributes to
- I will be attending the following future conferences x,y,z. Will you have a booth there? I can only pay proper attention to things when I am not in the office
- Have you talked with Jon Udell of Infoworld? Do you know when your product will be in their test labs?
Anyway, I have decided to re-double my efforts within my own enterprise to start evangelizing open source and will do so not because of cost or even quality of solution but so that I don't have to be irritated by sales people and the frustration they bring...
