What Are You Doing Right Now
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@Dashrender said:
There are only two conversations you should have with a sales person - 1) please give me information about your product, 2) ok I want to buy something, give me your best price...haggle.
And 3) verify information like compatibility, in stock-ness (new term I made up), time to delivery, news about old stock deals or new upcoming items, let me know about current sale items, etc.
Sales people can add a lot of value, you just have to use them for the value add rather than the value removal items.
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@BRRABill said:
@Dashrender said:
CIn the case of the plumber, in this situation he is the IT person. He is paid by you to do the research based on your stated needs. You hope that you hire an honorable one, just like you hope you hire an honorable IT person.
The plumber is not a sales person in this case.
Think about it this way. You want to remodel a bathroom. Just like your office needs a new server (or maybe doesn't). The plumber / it person should do everything in their power to get you the best solution they can.
There are only two conversations you should have with a sales person - 1) please give me information about your product, 2) ok I want to buy something, give me your best price...haggle.
Yes, I think my good experience are with consultants who are selling me stuff, not sales people.
Like the HVAC guy we recently used. He sold me this and that. But he seemed nice enough. When the bill came, I almost fell on the floor it was so low.
He charged less for 2 pounds of freon, 3 hours of work, and the 2 things he sold me (to stop the lights from dimming in the house when the AC kicks on) than the previous guy almost charged for the freon.
See, yes, I got screwed by the first guy, but pleasantly surprised by the second. So that's the guy I TRUST and will keep calling.
Exactly. I assume that the HVAC guy was getting paid. That's the key difference. Yes, there can be situations where you accidentally pay a sales person, whoops. But hiring a professional on an hourly rate whose explicit job is to advise you and represent you who might also sell some stuff does technically make them a salesman (as you said, everyone is to some degree) the advice is supposed to be coming from their paid consulting aspect (unless they state otherwise.) It's a social and generally legal contract.
Same with NTG, as an example. We are consultants, we don't make our money selling things. Technically you can buy some things from us... like MS Office 365 or hosted phone systems or AetherStore products. But there are some things that keep these from being problematic in the consulting process:
- The items are small and do not financially influence the conversation. Getting you to use us for just one more hour is far more valuable to us as a company than selling you pretty much anything. We work with long term customers, not one time "stopped in to get a deal" people so a sale that isn't valuable to the customer could hurt us a lot when the sale might only be worth $5.
- The consultants and engineers see zero commission. Zero. The only commission an engineer can make is from bringing in a new customer, not selling things to that customer. There is no financial incentive for the people giving the advice to skew things to make a sale. I doubt most even know what we sell. Just as @gjacobse if he knows that we can sell Meraki. I bet he doesn't.
- The consultants' jobs are to consult, not to sell. They have no corporate, social or legal mandate or even suggesting that they are to sell anything. They are customer agents, not vendor ones. But they do have the opposite: a social, legal and corporate mandate not to.
- Professionalism. The same professionalism that makes sales people ethically bound to sell makes consultants ethically bound to not sell when it doesn't benefit the customer.
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Having a bad day!
Can't get Windows 10 Deployment sorted!
It's my wedding anniversary! (Don't ask basics we and wife not together at the moment)
Got a headache (only a small one)
Got a CRM Developer moaning about his laptop because he's a pain and want XYZ so we bought one and it's not right!! -
@dafyre said:
Unlike @scottalanmiller -- I have no problems asking a sales rep, or a sales engineer, or a product engineer to point me at the right type of product for what I want to accomplish. As someone else said, "Trust but verify". The sales rep (especially one at a place like CDWG that deals with a lot of products) will likely know more about the types of products they have, and be able to get more technical folks involved if necessary.
After getting their answer, you then talk to another sales rep elsewhere and ask the same question with the same details and compare Vendor A and Vendor B (IE: CDWG vs Insight).
CDWG had a damaged relationship with my last employer because of some problems we had with their sales staff. After a lot of turnover, they got us a new rep (we had been going to other places for a long time at that point), and then he set about repairing their reputation with us. We would ask the new rep for some recommendations for say... Office computers. He would give us a spread of options and a list of prices, and then the IT Team would talk about it and check with other vendors and compare.
A lot of times for us (due mainly, to the size of the orders), CDWG was the winner in the quotes. Keeping in mind that was for office machines... What is wrong with that approach?
We didn't blindly go with what the sales rep said. We talked about it as a team and made our decision based on input from one another, and sales reps at the competing companies and the price tag that we were looking at.
I could go on for days as to why there are problems with this process, but here are a few:
- Unless you do this purely after and additionally to all of your own research, you are easily led astray. How do you oversee this process if you do not already have the answers?
- Salespeople have the job of misleading you to buy more than you need. Soliciting them to do so is tempting fate. You are tempting sales people to see if they can break your stamina or not or if they know more than you. Sure, you can resist this, but will you? I know that if I walk into ten car dealers and ask them all to show me what they got, even if I don't need a car I will walk out feeling like I do and I might just buy one. Because they are good sales people and I am human. To avoid having this happen, I don't go car shopping without knowing what I need and roughly what I want to buy. When I do talk to a salesman, I don't ask advice, I ask to test drive. The salesman is kept at arms length and I still do the deciding myself. When I bought my Chevy Spark ($13K) the dealer tried to talk me into the Corvette that they had the moment that they ran my financials. It wasn't about what was good for me, it was about what made commission.
- You might drop a vendor for a bad sales process, but remember that the sales people just move between them and it was the sales person that you were unhappy with, not the vendor. Every vendor is the same - the sales person is commissioned. So they act individually and the only thing that changes is the amount or type of commission.
- Every vendor is incentived from the same upstream vendors in the same ways. If one vendor upstream is having a huge high margin promotion, every downstream will react in the same way and even going to three or five or twenty resellers and asking for quotes will often result in the same misleading information based on the upstream vendor promotions. You do not mitigate this risk in this way.
- All vendors see similar margin ratios. This is a well known issue. No matter how many vendors you talk to they will always push SAN-based IPODs. The process of asking vendors for IT advice is what created the IPOD in the first place as it is the cheapest way to sell a SAN which has the highest margins. They all did it and millions of companies that were doing exactly this process fell victim to this design because it is the natural result of combining sales people giving advice, no IT checks and balances and the nature of storage margins. It is also what pushed RAID 5, all based on sales margins.
- Low cost products and free ones are not represented by sales vendors, as there are little or no margins so no means for them to get paid to sell them. If looking at software this would be a disaster as the landscape would shift from free to very expensive almost instantly. For everything. And low cost products that don't have a large number of resells would get missed as a product category. We see this all the time on SW as people do an RFP process and every time they miss the most obvious solutions for their problems because those solutions are free and going through sales people means that free or super low cost solutions, no matter how appropriate, were effectively eliminated from consideration.
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@BRRABill said:
That's about my point.
Giving them carte blanche and doing what they say is just dumb.
Of course, but even without a carte blanche how do you both use them and verify? The process of verifying requires you to do the full work and not use them. Having them do the work additionally and only after you have made decisions to reduce influence might be a decent double check, but unless you have completely above being influenced, I'd argue that it is more dangerous than it is useful. Just look at SW, even once people know why something is bad, sales people influence them dramatically. Sometimes with kickbacks and such.
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@Dashrender said:
One of my biggest complaints was right there in the OP - the CEO saw something at Best Buy - now go find me an option that I should use in my business for that same or better price.
Except.... it's a TV.
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@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
I get that a lot when people ask about a Mac for their kids.
You get what?
Actually a Mac doesn't have this problem (other than - why is a MAC more expensive than a Windows machine). Apple only has one line of laptops/desktops/etc. And they are all expensive. Apple doesn't make low end shit.
Or they ONLY make low end shit. It's the high end that Apple is missing. Just because they only make one thing doesn't make it high end. Nor does that it is expensive.
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@hobbit666 said:
Having a bad day!
Can't get Windows 10 Deployment sorted!
It's my wedding anniversary! (Don't ask basics we and wife not together at the moment)
Got a headache (only a small one)
Got a CRM Developer moaning about his laptop because he's a pain and want XYZ so we bought one and it's not right!!That's really crappy, sorry about that. Time to hit the pub. It's noon there right? Knock off early and disappear down a pint.
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Wow...
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1379373-the-site-to-site-vpn-connection
It doesn't matter what language you speak, this is someone who is clueless.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Wow...
http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/1379373-the-site-to-site-vpn-connection
It doesn't matter what language you speak, this is someone who is clueless.
I don't see the issue, he clearly thinks that SW is his IT Department who should have the answer.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
One of my biggest complaints was right there in the OP - the CEO saw something at Best Buy - now go find me an option that I should use in my business for that same or better price.
Except.... it's a TV.
Does that matter? The notion of a $2000 85 inch TV is currently pretty absurd. Sure there might have been a sale on POS TV that likely wouldn't give the CEO what he wanted, but that often doesn't matter - they saw a price and for whatever reason they think they can have their cake and eat it too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
I get that a lot when people ask about a Mac for their kids.
You get what?
Actually a Mac doesn't have this problem (other than - why is a MAC more expensive than a Windows machine). Apple only has one line of laptops/desktops/etc. And they are all expensive. Apple doesn't make low end shit.
Or they ONLY make low end shit. It's the high end that Apple is missing. Just because they only make one thing doesn't make it high end. Nor does that it is expensive.
You think MACs are low end shit? You feel they have less quality (in hardware) the most business class tier 1 providers?
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@scottalanmiller is also the only one I know that has had the issues with a Mac or Windows10 desktop that I have ever heard of. I have 2 MacBook Pro's and a Mac Mini and am actually quite happy with them. Of course I also use them the way they were meant to be used.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@dafyre said:
Unlike @scottalanmiller -- I have no problems asking a sales rep, or a sales engineer, or a product engineer to point me at the right type of product for what I want to accomplish. As someone else said, "Trust but verify". The sales rep (especially one at a place like CDWG that deals with a lot of products) will likely know more about the types of products they have, and be able to get more technical folks involved if necessary.
After getting their answer, you then talk to another sales rep elsewhere and ask the same question with the same details and compare Vendor A and Vendor B (IE: CDWG vs Insight).
CDWG had a damaged relationship with my last employer because of some problems we had with their sales staff. After a lot of turnover, they got us a new rep (we had been going to other places for a long time at that point), and then he set about repairing their reputation with us. We would ask the new rep for some recommendations for say... Office computers. He would give us a spread of options and a list of prices, and then the IT Team would talk about it and check with other vendors and compare.
A lot of times for us (due mainly, to the size of the orders), CDWG was the winner in the quotes. Keeping in mind that was for office machines... What is wrong with that approach?
We didn't blindly go with what the sales rep said. We talked about it as a team and made our decision based on input from one another, and sales reps at the competing companies and the price tag that we were looking at.
I could go on for days as to why there are problems with this process, but here are a few:
DAY 1
- Unless you do this purely after and additionally to all of your own research, you are easily led astray. How do you oversee this process if you do not already have the answers?
There is so much involved in IT that it can be quite overwhelming, especially for someone who is still getting their feet wet in the business. Despite the team diversity, there may not be someone who has all the answers. This is why, at the time, we asked our sales reps from various vendors what we were looking at if we wanted to do our projects.
CDWG was the only one that came back and asked for us to meet with their product engineers. We spoke with HP guys, and Dell guys, and I think EMC guys at the initial onset. There were product engineers, not sales reps. We spoke to them at length, both with and without the sales reps present on the calls.
At the time, places like Spiceworks were unknown to us. So we took the answers that we were given by HP, Dell, and EMC, and went back to verify the information we were given -- outside of CDWG and its partner channels. For the business case we were given, the HP solution met both our budget and provided what we were wanting.
DAY 2
- Salespeople have the job of misleading you to buy more than you need. Soliciting them to do so is tempting fate. You are tempting sales people to see if they can break your stamina or not or if they know more than you. Sure, you can resist this, but will you? I know that if I walk into ten car dealers and ask them all to show me what they got, even if I don't need a car I will walk out feeling like I do and I might just buy one.
This is simply fixed by not going to the car dealership if you don't need a car, lol. Likewise, if we knew what we needed, we would have told the sales rep, "Get us a quote for X."
They never ran our financials. We knew we couldn't do the Corvette or the Cadillac -- we told them that up front. They gave us a list of products and configurations that fell in the budget range we gave them, and we talked to the vendor engineers themselves (not just the sales reps) and WE picked the one that was the best fit for us at the time.
Because they are good sales people and I am human. To avoid having this happen, I don't go car shopping without knowing what I need and roughly what I want to buy. When I do talk to a salesman, I don't ask advice, I ask to test drive.
In the car world this is easier than IT. "Hey, That car fits my budget. Can I take it for a spin?"
Various car manufacturers all design their vehicles to do one thing: Get you from Point A to Point B. You know that the Dodge Viper will get you from A to B rather well, but you can't afford it. You also know that the Ford Focus (sorry, I'm a Ford owner now) will get you from A to B rather well, but you can afford it too. The dealership puts the price tags on the cars, if they want my business.
In the IT world it is still easy, but often times will require more effort in both researching the Myriad of products and multiple ways of doing things. Take storage. There's SAN, NAS, DAS, Local, Block, SMB, NFS, Sync, Replicated, RAID, and a whole myriad of other things to look at and take into account. No one IT person is going to know all of this up front if they have never looked at anything other than local storage before. So you research and ask your sales reps to research, and they can bring you back options and experts to talk to about all of these different things and provide you a vector (or verification) for your own research.
The salesman is kept at arms length and I still do the deciding myself. When I bought my Chevy Spark ($13K) the dealer tried to talk me into the Corvette that they had the moment that they ran my financials. It wasn't about what was good for me, it was about what made commission.
Yes. After the Sales rep has given you topics to research, and maybe a couple of experts to talk to about what you are trying to accomplish
DAY 3
- You might drop a vendor for a bad sales process, but remember that the sales people just move between them and it was the sales person that you were unhappy with, not the vendor. Every vendor is the same - the sales person is commissioned. So they act individually and the only thing that changes is the amount or type of commission.
No argument there. But if we have a bad sales process, we won't be doing business with the company that the sales rep works for.
- Every vendor is incentived from the same upstream vendors in the same ways. If one vendor upstream is having a huge high margin promotion, every downstream will react in the same way and even going to three or five or twenty resellers and asking for quotes will often result in the same misleading information based on the upstream vendor promotions. You do not mitigate this risk in this way.
This is why you ask for options, not promotions. Granted, it should be expected that you the get high margin promotions first -- after all the sales rep needs to eat too. But those can be easily tossed aside as outside of your budget range or not the product you are looking for after you do your own research.
DAY 4
- All vendors see similar margin ratios. This is a well known issue. No matter how many vendors you talk to they will always push SAN-based IPODs. The process of asking vendors for IT advice is what created the IPOD in the first place as it is the cheapest way to sell a SAN which has the highest margins. They all did it and millions of companies that were doing exactly this process fell victim to this design because it is the natural result of combining sales people giving advice, no IT checks and balances and the nature of storage margins. It is also what pushed RAID 5, all based on sales margins.
I don't argue that this is generally the case. We saw this happen when we were trying to purchase our storage setup. The question that we (the IT Team) kept coming back to "What happens if SAN 1 fails?" We asked the storage vendors we were speaking to about this, and two of them were like "you replicate from SAN1 to SAN2"... We liked the HP guys because they were the first one that told us that theirs was an active/passive cluster. No down time if SAN1 fails because SAN2 would automatically take over with no down time... Sadly, we did have to test this scenario several times, and (not so sadly) it worked beautifully.
DAY 5
- Low cost products and free ones are not represented by sales vendors, as there are little or no margins so no means for them to get paid to sell them. If looking at software this would be a disaster as the landscape would shift from free to very expensive almost instantly. For everything. And low cost products that don't have a large number of resells would get missed as a product category. We see this all the time on SW as people do an RFP process and every time they miss the most obvious solutions for their problems because those solutions are free and going through sales people means that free or super low cost solutions, no matter how appropriate, were effectively eliminated from consideration.
Right. This is why doing your own research is necessary. After you have been present with options from a sales rep. Especially on software. "We need somee Image editing software." Bam! Quote for Photoshop. Further research reveals Gimp. "What about Gimp?" "Oh, hey, this will do most of what we need, let's not buy Photoshop, yet."
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@Minion-Queen said:
@scottalanmiller is also the only one I know that has had the issues with a Mac or Windows10 desktop that I have ever heard of. I have 2 MacBook Pro's and a Mac Mini and am actually quite happy with them. Of course I also use them the way they were meant to be used.
I've heard stories of people who have had problems with Macs before - and I'm sure forums can be found with loads of people having issues - but those loads still probably amounts to less than .0001% of customers. People having problems often flock together, but are rarely offset by people who don't have problems (if you're not a techie, and not having problems, why would you be on the forums?).
So that said, from the small number of people I've actually heard complaining about hardware issues with their MACs compared to the number of people who I hear having problems with their consumer class Windows machines - I anecdotally lean toward assuming Mac hardware is of at least Business Class level hardware.
Hell, if you want to complain about hardware problems, then the new Surface Book is cheap consumer crap because of the problems it has - but I don't believe that. I believe the actual hardware is probably pretty darned nice - but the software/drivers were rushed and so the system has problems, which frankly was a bad move on MS's part - I wonder what drove them to releasing a product before it was ready? They are only still just getting into the PC consumer market, can they really afford to put out something that has these kinds of problems and not have their reputation sullied?
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@Minion-Queen said:
@scottalanmiller is also the only one I know that has had the issues with a Mac or Windows10 desktop that I have ever heard of. I have 2 MacBook Pro's and a Mac Mini and am actually quite happy with them. Of course I also use them the way they were meant to be used.
I have constant issues with Windows 10. I also have issues with iMac display. My previous machine was repaired a few times, last time display broke, after AppleCare expired, Apple gave me new model for free, and threw free fusion drive upgrade - that's $250 right there. The new machine had display replaced twice before, 3rd time as I type this. I'm picking it up today. And I hope it breaks again, I want to score free 5k iMac
Despite the issues, Macs are top quality machines. Low end shit is that plastic junk for less that $500. -
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@BRRABill said:
I get that a lot when people ask about a Mac for their kids.
You get what?
Actually a Mac doesn't have this problem (other than - why is a MAC more expensive than a Windows machine). Apple only has one line of laptops/desktops/etc. And they are all expensive. Apple doesn't make low end shit.
Or they ONLY make low end shit. It's the high end that Apple is missing. Just because they only make one thing doesn't make it high end. Nor does that it is expensive.
You think MACs are low end shit? You feel they have less quality (in hardware) the most business class tier 1 providers?
They make the best low end shit around! At least they actually support their products, which is really what you're paying for. Seriously, even a Mac Pro could only be considered a mid-range machine for Video editing, CAD work, etc.
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@dafyre said:
DAY 1
- Unless you do this purely after and additionally to all of your own research, you are easily led astray. How do you oversee this process if you do not already have the answers?
There is so much involved in IT that it can be quite overwhelming, especially for someone who is still getting their feet wet in the business. Despite the team diversity, there may not be someone who has all the answers. This is why, at the time, we asked our sales reps from various vendors what we were looking at if we wanted to do our projects.
Nothing wrong with outside help. But that help should come from IT people, not from sales people. Sales people are not your friends and not there to help you. If the sheep don't have a shepard, you hire one or get a llama, you don't just throw the sheep directly to the wolves. The need for outside help is universal, the need to get it from people who are on your side and not your enemy is also universal.
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@dafyre said:
CDWG was the only one that came back and asked for us to meet with their product engineers. We spoke with HP guys, and Dell guys, and I think EMC guys at the initial onset. There were product engineers, not sales reps. We spoke to them at length, both with and without the sales reps present on the calls.
This is where they mislead you with titles. If you were not paying them, they were sales people. Their income came purely through selling things to you. Their only financial incentives were to sell you something and the more that they could sell, the more they get paid. No matter what title someone has, if their job is to sell you things, they are a salesman.
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@dafyre said:
At the time, places like Spiceworks were unknown to us. So we took the answers that we were given by HP, Dell, and EMC, and went back to verify the information we were given -- outside of CDWG and its partner channels. For the business case we were given, the HP solution met both our budget and provided what we were wanting.
How did you verify in a way that didn't require you to have access to all of the answers without needing the salespeople? That's one of the problems. The ability to verify negates any need for using the salespeople. So if you have the ability to verify the issue doesn't come up.
