|
Audio Asylum Thread Printer Get a view of an entire thread on one page |
For Sale Ads |
73.229.29.71
In Reply to: RE: When is a salesman lying? posted by Rod M on May 07, 2017 at 12:32:32
"Hence, if you trust the engineers, you may find yourself to be a liar down the way."I think that depends on the engineer. If you're talking about engineers in product development that may be true. In my company, they don't speak to customers. They speak with company internal folks only, and usually through a product manager.
On the other hand customer facing engineers often need to keep the sales reps honest. After a sales rep stops speaking in a customer meeting, the customer turns and looks at the engineer. ;-) The customer facing engineer walks a thin line. Sometimes that thin line may piss off a sales rep possibly delaying a sale.
I was in that situation just two weeks ago. Customer is ready to cut a P.O. but the 'new version' is just on the horizon for next quarter.... and it's better and cheaper. I couldn't reveal details of this 'new version' but I mentioned it.
Fortunately in my company, the customer facing engineer does not work FOR the sales rep (but my sales reps are pretty honest guys). It's about a long term relationship as a trusted advisor vs a one time 'hit and run' sale.
Edits: 05/07/17Follow Ups:
Like any generalization, the exceptions are all over the map.
I typically worked with smaller start up type companies. Having a technical background, I learned quickly which engineers and development folks were the stars and which ones I could trust and which that I couldn't. Usually, we didn't have the customer engineers, so if I had an engineer in a meeting, it was likely either the President of the company or the VP of Development.
But I hear you, a lot of sales people in tech know little more than the benefit list on the product brochure and have little understanding of the complexity and how the stuff really works. Of course the same is true for some engineers.
I remember a time when we were setting up a booth for a trade show and the engineer couldn't get the Micro VAX to boot up. He called back to HQ and got bounced around from one person to another and was getting nowhere. After a few hours of this, we were getting worried as to whether he could get this fixed which was critical and we were running out of time. Finally, my regional manager and I decided that we better get involved and find out exactly what was going on. It seemed like it was booting, but the terminal was getting gibberish. We checked the cabling and then thought, 'I wonder how the terminal is set up'. Sure enough, it was set up wrong. We changed it to 9,600 baud and bingo, fixed.
The engineer on site was a PhD, but had absolutely no common sense.
-Rod
Micro VAX? That's old stuff, probably from the same 1980's era as the LSI 11/73 Q-bus systems I worked on along with the DEC RT-11 OS. I'm seriously dating myself!Larger companies often employ (pre-sales) Systems Engineers who are teamed up with a few sales reps. We do the real selling via whiteboard, proof of concept, demos, benchmarks, etc. The sales reps handle the P.O.s and cash the commission checks. ;-) Actually, we have some pretty sharp sales reps, many of whom are former SE's. I prefer not dealing with sales issues like forecasts, giving up margin through reseller partners, etc.
I had my own 'baud rate moment' last year. ALL of our serial management ports on the ILOM service processors were historically set to 9600, 8-bit, No-parity, 1 stop bit.... forever and on everything we sold. And then it changed not long ago to 115,200 baud. I was setting up a demo and didn't even get gibberish on my screen so I swapped cables then started randomly trying different settings until it worked. The terminal in this case was just my laptop with PuTTY tools on it.... but I do recall the old VT-100 terminals from a long time ago.
Edits: 05/08/17
FAQ |
Post a Message! |
Forgot Password? |
|
||||||||||||||
|
This post is made possible by the generous support of people like you and our sponsors: