By silicon.com, 30 November 2005 16:55
Nobody likes an aggressive salesman – whether it's a second-hand car salesman, pushy estate agent or the more recent stereotype of the obnoxious IT salesman.
IT is confusing at the best of times and these characters are often portrayed as exploiting uncertainty in the marketplace or hiding behind rapid-fire acronyms, meaningless stats, trumped up facts, worst case scenarios, scare tactics and over-promised benefits of cost and performance.
Comment out yesterday from analyst house Ovum suggests these characters are very real and are throwing their weight around in offices the length and breadth of the country. Among the tactics they use are the softly, softy 'first hit for free' approach of the drug pusher and the rather self-explanatory if (we hope) figurative 'gun in the mouth approach' of non-negotiable street robbery.
They'll tell you it's because their rivals are all the same way and they're not going to lie down and get trampled by the herd... possibly in more colourful terms.
But these aren't nice associations and not a great reflection on an industry which struggles for respectability at the best of times. And when we hear nightmare stories of the salesman from hell there are some big names cropping up time and time again. These aren't small vendors trying to muscle their way in with overzealous or ill-considered aggression, these are big companies many of us use.
Sadly, the opportunity to be responsible and self-regulating appears to be lost on the highly competitive IT industry where it is assumed nice guys will finish last.
But it's a blight on the reputation of an industry which needs to be showing it can be positive and communicative, not conniving and brutish.
Comments
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1. Bill Wood
Nothing new here. In the 60's, the Branch Manager of a very large IT company requested a private meeting with our Chairman.
His purpose proved to be to suggest the removal of my boss and me, because we'd produced figures to show the system they'd proposed would take 4 to 6 times as long as they'd quoted, to process the particular job.
Fortunately the wise Chairman had taken time to research the subject with us and the BM was politely sent away with the words "Thank you. I've been interested to hear what you've had to say. Please feel free to come and see me again if you're people are successful in proving mine to be wrong. I understand they've been unable to do so up to now".
The upshot was that a system twice as powerful was ordered and running time proved to be double that of the original quote.
2. Jim Welch
We develop o/s applications and we aren't bully boys. We sell on what we perceive as the strengths of our stuff, and the benefits our customers will gain.
When people try to sell aggressively to us, we send them packing, whatever the product. Phone package people are currently the most obnoxious and they don't seem to be very practised with their scripts either.
There's a lot of choice out there and an aggressive salesman is neither very good nor bright enough to realise that.