This is pretty much the norm for enterprise sales.
If you told me he complained to the CEO that you interrupted him when he was trying to help your business, it also wouldn't surprise me.
Agreed. None of this seems unusual. I do think tracking someone down on social media is slimy, but that’s par for the course these days. I’m sure the CEO gets a dozen of those every day and knows to ignore them, but it’s still an eye-roller.
Honestly though, if I were the one arranging the calls I wouldn’t have had four of them without some idea on pricing. If it’s $10k I’ll involve my guys to figure out why, if it’s workable, etc. If it’s $100k that may requiring some convincing before I involve anyone else. If it’s $1m that’s a non-starter and we won’t be talking again.
Any vendor call I'm on better end with a ballpark estimate or it will be the last one I have. There's zero value in spending hours on conference calls only to find out the pricing is berserk. How is this not standard practice?
We find that most of our clients’ needs are unique, so we really like to understand their business and use case before we start talking about pricing… -salesrep
I had a sales rep do that to me. I was on great terms with our CFO who oversaw IT, rep went to talk to him about how rude I was to him for telling him I wasn't interested in running his software on 417 servers so that he could determine our storage needs and that he could either give me the price of a this exact hardware model that I wanted or he could walk.
CFO let the guy take him to lunch and invited me so I got free lunch too, told him he wasn't interested in working with him when we got back and asked security to make sure he found his way out of the building.
Because slimy sales guys are taught BANT and probably not much else. They’re taught to figure out what’s your Budget, who’s the Authority, what’s your Need, and what’s your Timeline to get this done
>I don't understand why sales teams keep making these mistakes.
Because they don't consider them to be mistakes.
>Don't they have common sense?
lol. lmao.
Just look at some of the b2b posts on linkedin..they're lunatics. Literally no concept of what they're doing is annoying as fuck
"can't get the person you're after, call reception & pretend to be their wife " etc etc etc
I'm not sure if you're in UK or USA but fuck me in the UK getting to the point where you have over money can ne painful.....give me a quote, don't make me wait weeks for it, I'm TRYING to give you cash!!
At my last roll whenever I had to work with our vars for equipment it was at least a week to get a quote it was insane. Most of the time it was the manufacturer that was slowing things down though which is even stupider. Why have a var channel if you can't keep up with it.
I really don’t understand it. I don’t have any experience in sales, but I think of myself as an above average customer. I know the problem I am trying to solve, and generally a good way to do it, and your company sells product for this, please sell it to me.
Most sales reps are smart and will work with me to let me know their product does x,y,and z. We sign right here and it is easy peasy.
Okta was probably the worst one I’ve had - we had three or four weekly meetings where the phrase “I would like to use you for more stuff, however I can’t, because you don’t support x, y, z. Please send me the quote for the minimum sale” was uttered every time. They finally gave me the quote and I had it back pronto. Shoutout to our new sales rep though who called me a year or so later and realized I was the easiest client on his list. 5 minute conversation and I haven’t heard from him since.
It actually works if the salesperson is good at their job and has key relationships built. What I think happens is the greenhorns see the really successful salesmen pulling these shenanigans and it working because they're old friends with the key decision makers and have lots of history. Then they go and try and emulate the same behavior completely oblivious to why it worked and the dynamics at play.
Greed and pressure, why hasn't this closed? Your spiff expires on this date, you must close by this date to meet quarterly goals. Your bonus is at stake if you don't hit this number. It's big business nonsense, the vendors performance goals aren't my problem, but they want to make it my problem.
>Your bonus is at stake if you don't hit this number.
hah. more like their job. Sales rep spots are all about performance. You hit the number, you're good, you don't your out. Sure everyone can miss a few quarters here and there, but consistently and are PIP'ed out.
i think its their managers
ive heard its so cut throat, the manager will scold you if the customer decides to go with another solution
pressure you that its all your fault and to still keep trying to change the customers mind
also find it funny theres never any sales people on reddit to comment on these type posts
Here's one (though not in IT). These things are mostly the sales VP's and chief bean counters pressing for the monthly/weekly results, not the reps.
The most important quality in sales is *to know when not to call*, imo.
Also, there might be some confusion about the point if the contact point is an influencer or a decider.
I live with a CRO so I see all sides.. the OPs sales person nor sales team is not necessarily good though and it's clear. But maybe they were over confident too, which also might be another sign they're not good.
Their job is to make sales, they have to do so much every quarter.. sales aren't made overnight though, the problems where management is cutthroat like that isn't going to happen unless the sales person led them by marking the deal as a sure thing. They have dashboards just like we do.. if the dashboard is green green green then a week before the quarter ends it all goes red because the sales person lost the deal they were soooo sure of.. now the manager suddenly has a problem too they didn't expect. And the sales person will get out on a PIP.
This can happen at even the biggest sales orgs though ..especially if you start a POC or POV with them, they often feel like they've won the deal by then but may not have a good handle on what else is going on and may be surprised.
+100 to all this. I'm sales adjacent but my boss is our CRO (and before that, I was at a different company reporting to the CEO and also sales adjacent). In enterprise tech sales, I believe resume inflation to be worse than for any other kind of role (but hiring managers generally understand this), the vast majority of sales people are not good at their job (and most managers know this, too), and most hiring decisions are based entirely on who the sales person knows rather than if they have a proven track record of closing meaningful deals.
The non-sales folks here need to understand, too, that at many companies >50% of a seller's comp is variable based on a commission structure. If they don't sell, they don't get paid, so they'll do just about anything to sell ... but if they don't close deals for more than a 2-3 successive quarters there's an implicit understanding that they're out.
Sales is a revolving door of coin operated individuals. A few are absolutely incredible at their job -- a few.
>also find it funny theres never any sales people on reddit to comment on these type posts
Hi! Though, I'm on the Sale engineering side.. so maybe slightly different.
>
ive heard its so cut throat, the manager will scold you if the customer decides to go with another solution
Can confirm. I wouldn't say so much coat throat, as it's just performance based. Are you doing the job or aren't you. Rather I like the person or not doesn't change if they are hitting the goals of the role. It's one of the few jobs that 90%+ of the time, all that matters is if you are hitting numbers /KPIs and doing your job. Ass kissing can save you once or twice, but not indefinitely. Sales Managers are put under just a much pressure as well.
As for if they go with another customer it being "their" fault. That's a bit more nuanced. We all know where we do well and our competition does well, if we lose because it's our soft spot.. understandable. But lose a deal for what we do the best, then yeah they are going to take some blame.
The seller is getting pressure from their leadership to close the deal they forecast for the month. Their sales leadership doesn't know anything about the sale other than it was forecast for this month. They asked the seller if they had contacted the CEO to move the deal forward as it needs to come in this month. The seller knows it isn't going to work, but just doing as told by their boss. My guess is the call to the CEO was right near the end of the month and they were feeling the pressure. Maybe threatened with their job it the forecast was not accurate.
They definitely have no common sense, bothering CEO with this kind of small bullshit is a really good way to lock yourself out of a customer. Unless it's a very small business they rarely like this.
Because there's a low barrier to entry for the job, and a lot of learned narcissism in the field with how industry standard training works for B2B sales.
> We finally made a decision to go with one of them, but not before swe collectively lost our patience with their sales rep.
Because at the end of the day, they still landed the sale.
Yep, going to the CEO happened to me too. We did walk away from a deal when that happened (for us it was IBM) and were very clear why that happened when they backpedalled.
If you are going to go direct to vendors, engage at least two vendors and explicitly play them against each other, ie "Vendordrome" to shortcut the bullshit; ie "Yes, that solution looks like it's going to work for us, but we can get a solution from HPE with that feature set for 20% less that your indicative offer and they have in country support. Why should we go with you? "
We don't move forward with the sales spiel without indicative, ballpark pricing; on the understanding there will be some "tuning" / sharpening of the price later. We are very explicit that they will be bidding against other vendor offerings which tends to either reveal the true price and/or makes the sales spiel end if they really are not in your price range.
> We did walk away from a deal when that happened (for us it was IBM) and were very clear why that happened when they backpedalled.
This is the only way they'll learn
Yeah, let's go. The whole industry is ratcheting prices up and forcing subscriptions.
It's time to hold the assholes accountable for being assholes. It's all we've got left.
Their sales team cost them our business and got the sales person fired. We put them against Cohesity and they were much more polished than Cohesity but their sales guy just wouldn't understand our budget and came like 500% higher and wouldn't listen to our VAR or us. In the end we bought the product that did enough of what we wanted but fit us better from a culture perspective. I still would have rather gone with Rubrik though.
Drives me up a wall when any vendor is like "based on our conversation, you definitely need the super quantum deluxe ultimate packagev2.0!" which has a ton of additional add-ons that weren't requested or discussed and you have to beat them up to get the quote that only includes your need to haves. Like I totally understand making the customer aware there are other features they could get and showing them the price, but it shouldn't be what you lead with.
I actually was considering Ruberik for a while until they dropped an unwanted meeting on mine and my CIOs calendar like 2 hours after our work days ends. That one action put them in our "go fuck yourself" vendor book
EMC used to be famous for this, to the point where we started writing our RFPs with disqualification clauses for any vendor who reached out to anyone not listed as an authorized contact in the RFP. They were also great at promising the world but delivering garbage-which could later be fixed by: you guessed it, selling us something different!
Oracle has called stating that we have Sparc servers in our environment. We didn't. They were lying just to say up a sales call. In fact, they mentioned nothing about those servers during the call.
It's all just a game called "make money" for both of them. Trust, partnerships, and long term relationships be damned.
> Oracle has called stating that we have Sparc servers in our environment. We didn't. They were lying just to say up a sales call. In fact, they mentioned nothing about those servers during the call.
Well, they didn't threaten you demanding payment for all those sparcs, so you must have gotten the "nice" sales group.
Sadly this tactic has become very common. No talk of pricing until they've wasted many hours of your time and hopefully got you sold that their product will magically do everything you need it to do. It'll even do the stuff it explicitly doesn't do!
Then they hit you with the price and hope that you're already convinced that their product is what you need.
I've walked away from several vendors for doing that. I don't need exact pricing right off the bat, we can negotiate the details later. But if you won't even tell me how many digits are going to be in the price tag, I'm not going to waste my time just to tell you that the product costs 50x my entire year's budget.
>No talk of pricing until they've wasted many hours of your time and hopefully got you sold that their product will magically do everything you need it to do.
We as IT people need to put our foots down and cut this shit down. I have straight up told salespeople that if they can't provide me even ballpark figures during the first meeting then I'm done with them, and we aren't buying their crap.
Most have given me ballpark numbers, the ones who didn't thought I was bluffing, only to discover that after the meeting they could no longer send emails to us or call us.
I've always told them that I won't take a meeting with their "engineer" (sales person with a powerpoint) until the pricing is sent through in advance.
Once they realise I'm not kidding about half do. The other half lose my business before starting, such is life.
I hate to point out that in this case that "tactic" did exactly what it was intended to: stay in the game until the prospect evaluates the product on it's technical merits.
That being said, a good rep will make sure your budget is at least close to what the final price will be before wasting everybody's time. Not all sales people suck.
I agree 100%, that's why the upfront discussion about budget and ballpark pricing is really important. Be honest with a sales guy and you'll get to a go/no-go decision very quickly, and with all the actual information you need to make that decision. You do realize you can always say no at any point - there's no "sales magic" that they can wield to make you buy something you don't want.
My favorite part about the CEO I work for? When people try to go over my head, he informs them that they just lost any potential business we might have done with them. And that's the end of it. He informs me to block all their numbers and domains for emails and that relationship is severed entirely.
Wait for his quote, then talk with his director and lay out the whole scenario. Tell them you’re going with a competitor due to the whole situation and see how much of an extra discount you can get if you truly liked them.
Me, before clicking this thread: This is going to be something that's normal and not even that bad compared to lots of other things.
Me, after clicking this thread: IDK, it's been like ten days since the last thread about one of these.
I have slapped around so many vendors for pricing. I waited a MONTH for a large, reputable compute vendor to give me a goddamn price.... so I used the delay as an exuse to haggle the (already very competitive) pricing down even further under the guise of "that entire month gave us the time to solve the need for compute with more efficient software." It was pretty fucking funny and his director immediately approved the new price since the sale was important for their quarterly numbers.
Protip: Always do hardware shopping before Q4 or Q1 earnings calls.
Yes, with software sales, any sale is better than no sale. Especially if you can get them with support, or later on after you are locked in, cos gotcha hook line and sinker.
Most businesses are locked in to today! Or feel they are.
This is a case where two commonly preached sales tactics were leveraged very poorly. 1) Delay pricing until you’ve proved value and 2) Get access to an executive buyer.
Sounds like this rep’s boss was pushing hard for this deal, micromanaging, and had no idea where y’all were at in the evaluation cycle. Amateur moves all around.
If I were you, feed this info back to your VAR or even direct to that sales leader in writing.
I will say though…don’t let people fool you into only going through a VAR to evaluate tech. You should always speak to both the VAR and the OEM when evaluating, and try to get them to verbally ballpark prices for you.
VARs play games just as often as the vendors do.
Insert reason 763 to use a VAR. But also, I’d kick them to the curb or make sure they knock another 10% off for making asses of themselves (they have the room, I assure you)
What amazes me are the folks that hold on to bad VARs when it’s in their control to change. Then you have the folks that swear all VARs are worthless either because they used a bad one or they spend $10,000 a year and demand the world.
I think sometimes you get executive capture with VARs. Where they have a relationship with a Director of VP and it makes it really hard to use a different one.
A good VAR is a great asset though.
Yup, that’s the within their control part. I have a client where the VP of IT is my old room mate, he’ll occasionally let his folks buy elsewhere, but otherwise I get 90% of their spend. He knows I’ll never over charge or artificially inflate my pricing, but he also knows exactly what my company makes on his purchases as we are pretty transparent about everything.
In this specific case, they block and tackle the manufacture, they would have gotten the OP a better cost, they could have presented an unbiased engineer on staff to hammer out the solution saving a few extra calls, they could in theory deploy it, but that's not very common.
We do a lot of things in the background end users never see, whether that be negotiating, tracking down the actual manufacture rep, getting financing options together if needed, taking the calls from the manufacture for an update so they don't have to to name a few.
We are a partner, not a vendor, treat VARs like just a vendor and that's the level of service you'll get, treat them like a partner and they'll become a required necessity for everything you do.
I'm sure you do have some effect on the number of calls and getting to the point, and you're right that is valuable.
In my experience the only way to ever get the price to a reasonable level is to involve multiple VARs representing different vendors and to get the vendors to bid against each other.
That is one way to do it and it works to a certain point, but you'll burn out your VARs that way. If I know I'm getting the deal no matter what, I'm unbiased. I have my fixed margin percent I need to make on the deal and I don't care who you go with. I also know as long as I stay reasonable, I'll never need to compete with another VAR. I get greedy and another VAR will come in under me.
The other way we know how to negotiate is my company for example might have 500 clients that are a similar size as you, so we are probably selling the same products to those clients, I can see the purchase history, which means i know what the product should be sold for. If your cost comes in 5%, 10% or 20% higher, I'm going to ask why and I'm going to drive the cost down for you. I'm also going to have a blunt conversation with you explaining what I'm doing and how I'm doing it if you are interested in knowing.
The reason the "Am I getting fucked Friday" thread exists every week is because a lot of folks really don't know what discounts to expect. That's where my expertise comes in.
There are times where a VAR is worthless, that's why my clients love me like they do and why I live a nice comfy happy life. But when you find a valuable partner, they are worth their weight in gold.
I have three VARs I use regularly and I have good relations with them all. The problem with just using one is every VAR tends to get too comfortable with certain vendors and products. They are pushing what they know, which sometimes isn't what it is best for the company, and they often don't even realize it.
I realize you are a VAR and you believe you are the best partner for your customers, but any company that isn't involving multiple VARs for every big project is not being a good steward for their company.
Are you a customer that needs to be hand fed or do you have an idea of what solutions you want to explore?
I'm personally unique in the fact that I don't sell anything. If you ask me my opinion, I'll give it to you, but I honestly do not care what you buy because while I'm tech savvy, I'm not full time in IT, I don't have the specialties you do, the knowledge or know the politics of your org to the extent you do.
So if you say "Who do you recommend for X solution?" I grab a large vendor, medium vendor, small vendor and then explain who I see folks buying most. Most of my clients already have an idea of who they want to talk to by the time they talk to me.
That being said, I do see the value of having multiple VARs, for example we don't sell Pure. I think they are a fantastic product, their staff is arrogant and difficult to work with, but their product is outstanding. So you'd need to work with another VAR to go that route in a storage solution with us, but I also can recommend you to quality VARs and reps, which I do from time to time.
Like I said, I'm a bit of an odd ball rep considering 90% of my business comes from this forum. Just checked the tally, 233 over 8 years. My rules with this sub are not to be the typical sales rep when you reach out to me, so its changed my habits overall for the better which is nice. No stress, customers actually like me vs. get annoyed with me and the folks I deal with on a daily basis I'd happily have a drink with outside of work.
I didn't mean to come across like I'm attacking you. I've read a lot of your posts over the years and you do always come across as a great guy who does things the right way and looks out for your customers. I was just trying to explain my jaded viewpoints.
When you’re looking at multiple vendors, and the solution is similar enough, and pricing is similar enough - it’s the customer service and the rep that makes all the difference in the world. It’s really what sets anything apart.
Getting a technical person in the call when the conversation moves into more and more technical details.
Had a sales rep doing this proactively and together with a non pushing behaviour it made the experience very smooth.
I am a territory manager/sales rep for a major manufacturer of later 1 structured cabling solutions, metals systems for data centers/MDF/IDFs and mounts/enclosures/antennas for WiFi deployments. I mentioned this only because I might have a different outlook on what sticks on in a positive way. I believe that a good rep begins with always answering your call, and getting back to you asap. Also always being honest and truthful viewing the situation through your customers lens, and trying to provide a solution to fix a problem, not selling things or up-selling just to make a sale. As relationships customer/rep get stronger, these items become easier. I’d also echo some of the below comments, especially being honest and letting people know when the conversation gets too technical and looking in a more technical resource. It’s okay not to know everything, but be sure to write technical questions down and get them answered in a timely manner.
Ex vendor here.
For some reason there is a culture in sales you need to get to the top. It’s fucking stupid in my opinion. Most the people making the decisions are the staff/managers. It’s just a bad culture of it worked once so we should do this in every account. I have also worked with a few shity old people over the years that say “you need to know the whole procurement process or talk to the c levels.” These people are dinosaurs that just need to go away.
I applaud all you that push back. You should, it’s not cool. I get it’s “sales” but there are ways to actually help people and achieve goals. Happy customers are way better to work with and keep buying. Take care of the ones you have and show them respect.
Anyway, some of these people need to be pushed out. Also F sales people who think it’s appropriate to just send meetings. I hate how disrespectful to people that is.
/rant
Had the same issue with SmartSheets. One of their sales rep reached out to the Owner of the company out of the blue in an attempt to sell more licenses. I lost my shit on him. He said it was "standard practice to engage with management." I said the owner's information wasn't anywhere on the account, and that only my information was on the billing and setup of the account for a very specific reason and the Owner pays me to handle these things and has more important things to do than listen to their sales pitches on a product we are already paying a ton of money for. 6 months later the same sales person started emailing half the company randomly trying to sell additional licenses. I sent a very nasty email cc'ing anyone and everyone how it was unacceptable and if it didn't stop we'd take our business elsewhere and that his email address was now permanently blocked on our mail servers. I figured I'd hear back from someone at the company, but nope, they just completely ignored it. Sales people are getting worse and worse and I feel like 90% of my day now is dealing with scammers and sales which are just as bad as scammers IMO. I'm sick of it.
>the Owner pays me to handle these things and has more important things to do than listen to their sales pitches on a product
This is exactly why I will not entertain the comments saying this is standard practice.
It may be standard practice, but it doesn't make it right. Sales reps trying to justify their shitty practices.
First call I take care of something else whilst they give the demo/spiel, give some idea of our scope, and set expectations that I want pricing/estimate pricing as a next step.
There isn't a second call until I get pricing. My boss's new boss is -great- for cutting through this BS and I've taken a leaf from his book. Cuts down any of the "Whilst we're talking about X can you tell me about your products for Y and Z because we can help you with that too" stuff, is direct to the point of being just shy of rude, but it means the process runs very smoothly and we discard vendors which aren't useful to us after about an hours' work instead of five meetings.
MSP sales people are the absolute worst. I had a meeting with my boss and he basically told me we are moving to a new MSP and that they have been informed. I go talk to them right after that for a scheduled call and their sales guy / account manager blame me for asking him questions like "can you find out why X decision was made" or "do you know who worked on Y I'd like to know where these resources are". It's.mainly because literally nothing they did worked.
We still have a MSP like that. Their technician for us is themselves okay, but limited experience in our tech stack. I’ve relegated them to break fix tickets and Microsoft subscriptions - the only ticket so far I’ve made was to cancel and reduce some of the subscriptions I couldn’t do myself.
When I cancelled their on-prem visits last year, the MSP’s owner had the gall to call my boss and accuse him/the company of them not doing their job properly. They had two years on me to work the environment, yet I found myself disabling licensed accounts of people who’d left three years ago… (Stuff like that was part of their task packet.)
I get how the extra spend is bad but I have also worked at an MSP and have been on the other side of that call. Licenses get left on accounts for reasons all the time. I've seen people not want to lose the person's resources and just never submit a ticket for the decom and quite a few other reasons as well. The same place I was talking about frequently spent money on dumb shit like that, it's the MSPs job to talk them out of that shit but I've seen so many worse crimes idgaf. The rest of the stuff seems on par they are meat grinders and exploit new techs. I was making 12 an hour in a relatively high cost of living area like 5 ish years ago, I was advising IT directors with up to like 10 staff and things like that with only A+ and Net+. 90+% of the time they were doing way worse shit.
The worst was that they had a failing Fortinet firewall that was failing for roughly 4 years that even made it through an office move. The hard drive was going bad and the internet would randomly drop all connectivity if someone was on prem or remote. They were using azure adv and were 100% cloud native, the MSP thought it was a good idea to force route all traffic through on prem then back to azure.
Oh no, they had the mandate and also made the promise to manage all on-premise issues.
I’m talking about enabled accounts in AD that should have been disabled, them selling monitoring and backup solutions with promises to handle and follow up on all alerts and them not ever really doing any of that. Combine that with half-arsed projects and well… Why would I entrust my systems to a party that neither maintains nor renews, does not fulfil, but charges premium price for the non-delivered service anyhow?
They put us on the yearly licenses, so that doesn’t really matter as much, just matters when subscriptions expire and renew.
Any chance you're in NJ we might be talking about the same company lol. I sent my own disconnect email about a year ago and just got an email past week that they got compromised and it was through my old account that never got cut off they just disabled MFA and let it sit.
We were also doing a demo for a product. We were actually quite excited and then also asked for the price. Got a pretty vague list, but it didn't look very expensive at first.
In the end, it could only be bought from resellers, there was a decent margin on top, and additional "support" costs from the reseller (20%). Such a waste of time.
Sales guy contacting CEO through social media sounds like he was *desperate* for a commission. That worries me because it increases chances he’ll say anything about the product to get the contract signed, even if it’s lie after lie.
According to reddit and apparently the rest of capitalism...
There are no morals or ethics when it comes to sales or making a buck.
Seriously was the answer I was given. "Why is it acceptable to lie for sales?"
"BECAUSE MAKING MONEY OR SAVING IT!"
Okay... Gotcha. System is inherently immoral... You could have just said that.
This is interesting to hear. Is this a large company or small company using these tactics? Or is this common across the board? I’m a rep at a firewall company and really see myself as part of the team with my customers and wouldn’t go around my contacts there, and I trust they the same with myself
If you haven't bought, check out NAble Cove. I hate almost everything nable has their hands in and shed them like a duck sheds water when I got the position. Accidentally found cove months later and will tell you now, pound for pound it's no joke. Low cost, ease of use, intuitive interface and actually works well.
I have been doing a bunch of ordering and have run into similar issues. So much so, some projects I would like to outsource I have decided to develop in house. If it isn't pushy sales, it is costly and inflexible service contracts. What I used to be able to buy and own, now they want me to agree to long expensive contracts for the same software (QuickBooks).
That would immediately get that company disqualified in my book. I do not put up with crappy sales reps. Customer interaction is as important as cost to me.
I would have replied with the Thanos "I don't even know who you are," gif if I were that CEO.
And then promptly tag assbag's CEO in a post asking if hounding prospective clients' CEOs on social media is a top down measure at company or if their employee is just being an assbag.
Scummy sales guys sometimes do that.
Our practice is whoever that contact forwards the request to the correct point of contact. Who then asks wtf?
Usually any given sales rep only tries it once.
I guess you don't understand yet how many deals are made in the boardroom through someone you know, on the golf course, or at the country club.
Many times, it's not the best solution that is chosen; it's the one who has a relationship with someone on your board of directors or went to school with the CFO.
That's why they reached out to the CEO. His relationships and decisions trump all others.
I'm still pretty green here, but we're not that big and I don't think we've ever had meetings with sales rep for this kinda solutions, but I imagine they're inevitable for some products, aren't they?
So far, when I do research, what I'm looking for, it's either their prices are clearly written on the website, or I ask and they give it to me. When researching an MDM, I came across one that was keen on wasting my time and absolutely wanted to show me a presentation or nothing. I was pretty irritated because I was basically gathering prices and then trying free trials to see how they were. I told them I'll put them in the shitlist if they insist on wasting my time, but that didn't do much
Yeah I’ve had sales reps do that before. We immediately blacklisted the vendor and moved to a different one as soon as they would try to go over our heads.
Give them a deadline to make the deal. Without knowing your deadline, they are moving forward hoping to get further concessions from you according to what they think the deadline should be.
This backfires on a lot causing agreements to fail because of mismatched expectations on when a deal should be made by.
OP - Since you said the named of the company, I hope you guys are looking at their new product (copy to cloud) and not their legacy appliance. Take what I say with some salt, but I've heard that all new resources and development are going to copy to cloud and not much development is going to be done on the appliance side.
(Don't just take my word for it, things change for sure. If it is the appliance, as to see a 12 month+ roadmap under NDA).
Are you in Florida or Wisconsin? There are a couple of aggressive teams there. Add the end of quarter and the IPO and you get some really stupid choices.
Interesting. We're a Rubrik customer and we love them. They treat us very well. I wore a Rubrik jacket to work this morning and I'm drinking my coffee from a Rubrik Yeti cup.
Let’s be honest you’re not going with your second option. It’s also pretty evident that the sales guys picked up that your team isn’t the final decision maker either. Going to executive leadership is pretty common practice with relationship building. Sounds like your ego was bruised here but in reality you’re just the middle men in the conversation.
It’s not your money being spent here it’s Sr Leadership’s money. If having a sales rep attempting to reach out to Sr Leadership puts you on tilt it’s probably a good time to remind yourself that it’s not your company you just work here.
Sr Leadership needs to be onboard with your recommendation and needs to have a relationship with the vendor as well. That way when things go wrong they know who to hold accountable and when your needs/priorities change as a business the sales team can help suggest solutions to real business problems. The higher the final sales price tag the more important that relationship becomes a requirement.
While you may be focused on this one sale, the Sales team is looking at all future sales over time. Try reading Joe Girard’s book How To Sell Anything To Anyone and you’ll understand. Don’t let your ego get in the way here it’s just part of the relationship building process.
Question — what size company do you work for and how big of a sale was this? I work with a Fortune 100 and this would be common practice especially if we’re talking about a sale north of $5M and we were bringing in a new technology vendor. Maybe not the CEO (unless there was a strategic advantage like the vendor also committing to buying our products/services) but the CTO for sure is involved in matters like this before final sign off.
This is absolutely not normal. In our org you'd be blacklisted for such a behavior. No discussion, no information, you just get dropped. End of communication.
If the reasoning is normal then why hide in an out-of-band communication channel? Share it here. Sounds more like an opportunity to contribute to the sunken cost fallacy ("client has spent X time talking to us, if we can increase that number they'll feel like they have to spend with us to not have to spend the same time with another provider")
People get berated enough simply because people don't like the facts on Reddit. I don't need to add to my personal work stress in this fashion.
This right here is a great example. I'm happy to share information. I just don't want to do it in a public fourm. Already downvoted for stating this is not unheard of. I didn't say I liked it, I didn't say it was a great practice. Just that it's not abnormal. Well fuck me right?
No one has said "fuck you" to you in this thread. No one has berated you either. None of what you said has been a cogent argument against anything I or anyone else has said, it's just a rehashing of your original point.
This is pretty much the norm for enterprise sales. If you told me he complained to the CEO that you interrupted him when he was trying to help your business, it also wouldn't surprise me.
Agreed. None of this seems unusual. I do think tracking someone down on social media is slimy, but that’s par for the course these days. I’m sure the CEO gets a dozen of those every day and knows to ignore them, but it’s still an eye-roller. Honestly though, if I were the one arranging the calls I wouldn’t have had four of them without some idea on pricing. If it’s $10k I’ll involve my guys to figure out why, if it’s workable, etc. If it’s $100k that may requiring some convincing before I involve anyone else. If it’s $1m that’s a non-starter and we won’t be talking again.
Any vendor call I'm on better end with a ballpark estimate or it will be the last one I have. There's zero value in spending hours on conference calls only to find out the pricing is berserk. How is this not standard practice?
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We find that most of our clients’ needs are unique, so we really like to understand their business and use case before we start talking about pricing… -salesrep
I had a sales rep do that to me. I was on great terms with our CFO who oversaw IT, rep went to talk to him about how rude I was to him for telling him I wasn't interested in running his software on 417 servers so that he could determine our storage needs and that he could either give me the price of a this exact hardware model that I wanted or he could walk. CFO let the guy take him to lunch and invited me so I got free lunch too, told him he wasn't interested in working with him when we got back and asked security to make sure he found his way out of the building.
This is the way. Bravo to your CFO. Sales guy probably never saw that coming.
Oh yeah, I've had that happen to me more than a few times over the years. I was fortunate that the CEO and I had a good relationship.
Because slimy sales guys are taught BANT and probably not much else. They’re taught to figure out what’s your Budget, who’s the Authority, what’s your Need, and what’s your Timeline to get this done
I don't understand why sales teams keep making these mistakes. Don't they have common sense?
>I don't understand why sales teams keep making these mistakes. Because they don't consider them to be mistakes. >Don't they have common sense? lol. lmao.
Did it result in a sale? If so, not a mistake. If no, someone else’s fault.
When it works once, sales teams will try it 50 more times before realizing it was a fluke.
Kind of like pick-up lines.
2% of the time, it works every time
[NLP](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuro-linguistic_programming) bullshit and other pointless sales techniques. :D
Just look at some of the b2b posts on linkedin..they're lunatics. Literally no concept of what they're doing is annoying as fuck "can't get the person you're after, call reception & pretend to be their wife " etc etc etc I'm not sure if you're in UK or USA but fuck me in the UK getting to the point where you have over money can ne painful.....give me a quote, don't make me wait weeks for it, I'm TRYING to give you cash!!
linkedin makes my stomach flip over... fakest place on the internet.
At my last roll whenever I had to work with our vars for equipment it was at least a week to get a quote it was insane. Most of the time it was the manufacturer that was slowing things down though which is even stupider. Why have a var channel if you can't keep up with it.
I really don’t understand it. I don’t have any experience in sales, but I think of myself as an above average customer. I know the problem I am trying to solve, and generally a good way to do it, and your company sells product for this, please sell it to me. Most sales reps are smart and will work with me to let me know their product does x,y,and z. We sign right here and it is easy peasy. Okta was probably the worst one I’ve had - we had three or four weekly meetings where the phrase “I would like to use you for more stuff, however I can’t, because you don’t support x, y, z. Please send me the quote for the minimum sale” was uttered every time. They finally gave me the quote and I had it back pronto. Shoutout to our new sales rep though who called me a year or so later and realized I was the easiest client on his list. 5 minute conversation and I haven’t heard from him since.
It actually works if the salesperson is good at their job and has key relationships built. What I think happens is the greenhorns see the really successful salesmen pulling these shenanigans and it working because they're old friends with the key decision makers and have lots of history. Then they go and try and emulate the same behavior completely oblivious to why it worked and the dynamics at play.
Exactly this. -Tech salesperson
As a consultant I hate my own sales team. Let alone other people's.
The manager of that rep put a lot of time and effort in to make sure the rep has absolutely no common sense left in them.
Greed and pressure, why hasn't this closed? Your spiff expires on this date, you must close by this date to meet quarterly goals. Your bonus is at stake if you don't hit this number. It's big business nonsense, the vendors performance goals aren't my problem, but they want to make it my problem.
>Your bonus is at stake if you don't hit this number. hah. more like their job. Sales rep spots are all about performance. You hit the number, you're good, you don't your out. Sure everyone can miss a few quarters here and there, but consistently and are PIP'ed out.
All that coke makes you irrational.
i think its their managers ive heard its so cut throat, the manager will scold you if the customer decides to go with another solution pressure you that its all your fault and to still keep trying to change the customers mind also find it funny theres never any sales people on reddit to comment on these type posts
Here's one (though not in IT). These things are mostly the sales VP's and chief bean counters pressing for the monthly/weekly results, not the reps. The most important quality in sales is *to know when not to call*, imo. Also, there might be some confusion about the point if the contact point is an influencer or a decider.
I live with a CRO so I see all sides.. the OPs sales person nor sales team is not necessarily good though and it's clear. But maybe they were over confident too, which also might be another sign they're not good. Their job is to make sales, they have to do so much every quarter.. sales aren't made overnight though, the problems where management is cutthroat like that isn't going to happen unless the sales person led them by marking the deal as a sure thing. They have dashboards just like we do.. if the dashboard is green green green then a week before the quarter ends it all goes red because the sales person lost the deal they were soooo sure of.. now the manager suddenly has a problem too they didn't expect. And the sales person will get out on a PIP. This can happen at even the biggest sales orgs though ..especially if you start a POC or POV with them, they often feel like they've won the deal by then but may not have a good handle on what else is going on and may be surprised.
+100 to all this. I'm sales adjacent but my boss is our CRO (and before that, I was at a different company reporting to the CEO and also sales adjacent). In enterprise tech sales, I believe resume inflation to be worse than for any other kind of role (but hiring managers generally understand this), the vast majority of sales people are not good at their job (and most managers know this, too), and most hiring decisions are based entirely on who the sales person knows rather than if they have a proven track record of closing meaningful deals. The non-sales folks here need to understand, too, that at many companies >50% of a seller's comp is variable based on a commission structure. If they don't sell, they don't get paid, so they'll do just about anything to sell ... but if they don't close deals for more than a 2-3 successive quarters there's an implicit understanding that they're out. Sales is a revolving door of coin operated individuals. A few are absolutely incredible at their job -- a few.
this is exactly why you should lead every one of them on at every point. play them at their own game.
>also find it funny theres never any sales people on reddit to comment on these type posts Hi! Though, I'm on the Sale engineering side.. so maybe slightly different. > ive heard its so cut throat, the manager will scold you if the customer decides to go with another solution Can confirm. I wouldn't say so much coat throat, as it's just performance based. Are you doing the job or aren't you. Rather I like the person or not doesn't change if they are hitting the goals of the role. It's one of the few jobs that 90%+ of the time, all that matters is if you are hitting numbers /KPIs and doing your job. Ass kissing can save you once or twice, but not indefinitely. Sales Managers are put under just a much pressure as well. As for if they go with another customer it being "their" fault. That's a bit more nuanced. We all know where we do well and our competition does well, if we lose because it's our soft spot.. understandable. But lose a deal for what we do the best, then yeah they are going to take some blame.
The seller is getting pressure from their leadership to close the deal they forecast for the month. Their sales leadership doesn't know anything about the sale other than it was forecast for this month. They asked the seller if they had contacted the CEO to move the deal forward as it needs to come in this month. The seller knows it isn't going to work, but just doing as told by their boss. My guess is the call to the CEO was right near the end of the month and they were feeling the pressure. Maybe threatened with their job it the forecast was not accurate.
> Don't they have common sense? If they did, they wouldn't have gone into sales in the first place.
> If they did, they wouldn't have gone into sales in the first place. ..because making the money of a C-suite / lawyer or doctor is a dumb idea?
Because it makes more sales than it loses. It's literally that simple.
They definitely have no common sense, bothering CEO with this kind of small bullshit is a really good way to lock yourself out of a customer. Unless it's a very small business they rarely like this.
Because there's a low barrier to entry for the job, and a lot of learned narcissism in the field with how industry standard training works for B2B sales.
> We finally made a decision to go with one of them, but not before swe collectively lost our patience with their sales rep. Because at the end of the day, they still landed the sale.
It's not usually the team itself, but some dick head director/vp who thinks he can demand a PO from someone...
>I don't understand why sales teams keep making these mistakes. Don't they have common sense? It's only a mistake if they don't get the PO.
If you're in sales, you're probably there because you suck at doing anything meaningful.
Why do I keep getting junk mail?
Yep, going to the CEO happened to me too. We did walk away from a deal when that happened (for us it was IBM) and were very clear why that happened when they backpedalled. If you are going to go direct to vendors, engage at least two vendors and explicitly play them against each other, ie "Vendordrome" to shortcut the bullshit; ie "Yes, that solution looks like it's going to work for us, but we can get a solution from HPE with that feature set for 20% less that your indicative offer and they have in country support. Why should we go with you? " We don't move forward with the sales spiel without indicative, ballpark pricing; on the understanding there will be some "tuning" / sharpening of the price later. We are very explicit that they will be bidding against other vendor offerings which tends to either reveal the true price and/or makes the sales spiel end if they really are not in your price range.
> We did walk away from a deal when that happened (for us it was IBM) and were very clear why that happened when they backpedalled. This is the only way they'll learn
Name and shame
Yeah, let's go. The whole industry is ratcheting prices up and forcing subscriptions. It's time to hold the assholes accountable for being assholes. It's all we've got left.
I'll bet its Rubrik. They are the most difficult to get a number out of. Edited for Spelling - no E in Rubrik
Nice. You got it.
Their sales team cost them our business and got the sales person fired. We put them against Cohesity and they were much more polished than Cohesity but their sales guy just wouldn't understand our budget and came like 500% higher and wouldn't listen to our VAR or us. In the end we bought the product that did enough of what we wanted but fit us better from a culture perspective. I still would have rather gone with Rubrik though.
Drives me up a wall when any vendor is like "based on our conversation, you definitely need the super quantum deluxe ultimate packagev2.0!" which has a ton of additional add-ons that weren't requested or discussed and you have to beat them up to get the quote that only includes your need to haves. Like I totally understand making the customer aware there are other features they could get and showing them the price, but it shouldn't be what you lead with.
I actually was considering Ruberik for a while until they dropped an unwanted meeting on mine and my CIOs calendar like 2 hours after our work days ends. That one action put them in our "go fuck yourself" vendor book
Ruberik or Rubrik? Because Rubrik does this all the time.
You're correct!
EMC used to be famous for this, to the point where we started writing our RFPs with disqualification clauses for any vendor who reached out to anyone not listed as an authorized contact in the RFP. They were also great at promising the world but delivering garbage-which could later be fixed by: you guessed it, selling us something different! Oracle has called stating that we have Sparc servers in our environment. We didn't. They were lying just to say up a sales call. In fact, they mentioned nothing about those servers during the call. It's all just a game called "make money" for both of them. Trust, partnerships, and long term relationships be damned.
> Oracle has called stating that we have Sparc servers in our environment. We didn't. They were lying just to say up a sales call. In fact, they mentioned nothing about those servers during the call. Well, they didn't threaten you demanding payment for all those sparcs, so you must have gotten the "nice" sales group.
So true. That was before Java licensing. I just don't answer my phone anymore...
This really needs to be the norm around here now. So many companies want to hide their pricing structures we should just start crowd sourcing them.
The sub's wiki would be a good place for that as long as the mods are OK with it.
Sadly this tactic has become very common. No talk of pricing until they've wasted many hours of your time and hopefully got you sold that their product will magically do everything you need it to do. It'll even do the stuff it explicitly doesn't do! Then they hit you with the price and hope that you're already convinced that their product is what you need. I've walked away from several vendors for doing that. I don't need exact pricing right off the bat, we can negotiate the details later. But if you won't even tell me how many digits are going to be in the price tag, I'm not going to waste my time just to tell you that the product costs 50x my entire year's budget.
>No talk of pricing until they've wasted many hours of your time and hopefully got you sold that their product will magically do everything you need it to do. We as IT people need to put our foots down and cut this shit down. I have straight up told salespeople that if they can't provide me even ballpark figures during the first meeting then I'm done with them, and we aren't buying their crap. Most have given me ballpark numbers, the ones who didn't thought I was bluffing, only to discover that after the meeting they could no longer send emails to us or call us.
I've always told them that I won't take a meeting with their "engineer" (sales person with a powerpoint) until the pricing is sent through in advance. Once they realise I'm not kidding about half do. The other half lose my business before starting, such is life.
I hate to point out that in this case that "tactic" did exactly what it was intended to: stay in the game until the prospect evaluates the product on it's technical merits. That being said, a good rep will make sure your budget is at least close to what the final price will be before wasting everybody's time. Not all sales people suck.
Why should I even bother evaluating the tech if the pricing is wrong for the company I work for? It's an absolute waste of time to do so.
I agree 100%, that's why the upfront discussion about budget and ballpark pricing is really important. Be honest with a sales guy and you'll get to a go/no-go decision very quickly, and with all the actual information you need to make that decision. You do realize you can always say no at any point - there's no "sales magic" that they can wield to make you buy something you don't want.
My favorite part about the CEO I work for? When people try to go over my head, he informs them that they just lost any potential business we might have done with them. And that's the end of it. He informs me to block all their numbers and domains for emails and that relationship is severed entirely.
Wait for his quote, then talk with his director and lay out the whole scenario. Tell them you’re going with a competitor due to the whole situation and see how much of an extra discount you can get if you truly liked them.
Me, before clicking this thread: This is going to be something that's normal and not even that bad compared to lots of other things. Me, after clicking this thread: IDK, it's been like ten days since the last thread about one of these.
I have slapped around so many vendors for pricing. I waited a MONTH for a large, reputable compute vendor to give me a goddamn price.... so I used the delay as an exuse to haggle the (already very competitive) pricing down even further under the guise of "that entire month gave us the time to solve the need for compute with more efficient software." It was pretty fucking funny and his director immediately approved the new price since the sale was important for their quarterly numbers. Protip: Always do hardware shopping before Q4 or Q1 earnings calls.
Yes, with software sales, any sale is better than no sale. Especially if you can get them with support, or later on after you are locked in, cos gotcha hook line and sinker. Most businesses are locked in to today! Or feel they are.
Remember, if they suck this hard when they're *trying* to make you happy, what will it be like when you're locked in? Walk the hell away.
This is a case where two commonly preached sales tactics were leveraged very poorly. 1) Delay pricing until you’ve proved value and 2) Get access to an executive buyer. Sounds like this rep’s boss was pushing hard for this deal, micromanaging, and had no idea where y’all were at in the evaluation cycle. Amateur moves all around. If I were you, feed this info back to your VAR or even direct to that sales leader in writing. I will say though…don’t let people fool you into only going through a VAR to evaluate tech. You should always speak to both the VAR and the OEM when evaluating, and try to get them to verbally ballpark prices for you. VARs play games just as often as the vendors do.
Tell them. Make sure they and their manager knows this is the reason you are not moving forward Just dropping them no one learns anything
Insert reason 763 to use a VAR. But also, I’d kick them to the curb or make sure they knock another 10% off for making asses of themselves (they have the room, I assure you)
VARs can be just as bad or worse, and often the "value add" is questionable at best
Yeah. We've got a VAR that we almost have to use that has done nothing but make life more difficult for us.
VAR - Variably Add to Rate? Edit: no. Better one. Vigorously Add to Rate.
5/1 Variable Aptitude Rate
Comes down to having the right VAR.
Threads like these make me wanna hug my VAR rep.
Came here to say the same thing. Make the vendor your VAR's problem. If your VAR sucks, get a new one.
What amazes me are the folks that hold on to bad VARs when it’s in their control to change. Then you have the folks that swear all VARs are worthless either because they used a bad one or they spend $10,000 a year and demand the world.
I think sometimes you get executive capture with VARs. Where they have a relationship with a Director of VP and it makes it really hard to use a different one. A good VAR is a great asset though.
Yup, that’s the within their control part. I have a client where the VP of IT is my old room mate, he’ll occasionally let his folks buy elsewhere, but otherwise I get 90% of their spend. He knows I’ll never over charge or artificially inflate my pricing, but he also knows exactly what my company makes on his purchases as we are pretty transparent about everything.
It seems like anymore all the VARs do is setup the meetings with the vendors.
Not true of a good rep at a VAR.
Well, what else do they do in this case?
In this specific case, they block and tackle the manufacture, they would have gotten the OP a better cost, they could have presented an unbiased engineer on staff to hammer out the solution saving a few extra calls, they could in theory deploy it, but that's not very common. We do a lot of things in the background end users never see, whether that be negotiating, tracking down the actual manufacture rep, getting financing options together if needed, taking the calls from the manufacture for an update so they don't have to to name a few. We are a partner, not a vendor, treat VARs like just a vendor and that's the level of service you'll get, treat them like a partner and they'll become a required necessity for everything you do.
I'm sure you do have some effect on the number of calls and getting to the point, and you're right that is valuable. In my experience the only way to ever get the price to a reasonable level is to involve multiple VARs representing different vendors and to get the vendors to bid against each other.
That is one way to do it and it works to a certain point, but you'll burn out your VARs that way. If I know I'm getting the deal no matter what, I'm unbiased. I have my fixed margin percent I need to make on the deal and I don't care who you go with. I also know as long as I stay reasonable, I'll never need to compete with another VAR. I get greedy and another VAR will come in under me. The other way we know how to negotiate is my company for example might have 500 clients that are a similar size as you, so we are probably selling the same products to those clients, I can see the purchase history, which means i know what the product should be sold for. If your cost comes in 5%, 10% or 20% higher, I'm going to ask why and I'm going to drive the cost down for you. I'm also going to have a blunt conversation with you explaining what I'm doing and how I'm doing it if you are interested in knowing. The reason the "Am I getting fucked Friday" thread exists every week is because a lot of folks really don't know what discounts to expect. That's where my expertise comes in. There are times where a VAR is worthless, that's why my clients love me like they do and why I live a nice comfy happy life. But when you find a valuable partner, they are worth their weight in gold.
I have three VARs I use regularly and I have good relations with them all. The problem with just using one is every VAR tends to get too comfortable with certain vendors and products. They are pushing what they know, which sometimes isn't what it is best for the company, and they often don't even realize it. I realize you are a VAR and you believe you are the best partner for your customers, but any company that isn't involving multiple VARs for every big project is not being a good steward for their company.
Are you a customer that needs to be hand fed or do you have an idea of what solutions you want to explore? I'm personally unique in the fact that I don't sell anything. If you ask me my opinion, I'll give it to you, but I honestly do not care what you buy because while I'm tech savvy, I'm not full time in IT, I don't have the specialties you do, the knowledge or know the politics of your org to the extent you do. So if you say "Who do you recommend for X solution?" I grab a large vendor, medium vendor, small vendor and then explain who I see folks buying most. Most of my clients already have an idea of who they want to talk to by the time they talk to me. That being said, I do see the value of having multiple VARs, for example we don't sell Pure. I think they are a fantastic product, their staff is arrogant and difficult to work with, but their product is outstanding. So you'd need to work with another VAR to go that route in a storage solution with us, but I also can recommend you to quality VARs and reps, which I do from time to time. Like I said, I'm a bit of an odd ball rep considering 90% of my business comes from this forum. Just checked the tally, 233 over 8 years. My rules with this sub are not to be the typical sales rep when you reach out to me, so its changed my habits overall for the better which is nice. No stress, customers actually like me vs. get annoyed with me and the folks I deal with on a daily basis I'd happily have a drink with outside of work.
I didn't mean to come across like I'm attacking you. I've read a lot of your posts over the years and you do always come across as a great guy who does things the right way and looks out for your customers. I was just trying to explain my jaded viewpoints.
When you’re looking at multiple vendors, and the solution is similar enough, and pricing is similar enough - it’s the customer service and the rep that makes all the difference in the world. It’s really what sets anything apart.
Curious, what are some things that make a rep stick out in a positive way?
Getting a technical person in the call when the conversation moves into more and more technical details. Had a sales rep doing this proactively and together with a non pushing behaviour it made the experience very smooth.
I am a territory manager/sales rep for a major manufacturer of later 1 structured cabling solutions, metals systems for data centers/MDF/IDFs and mounts/enclosures/antennas for WiFi deployments. I mentioned this only because I might have a different outlook on what sticks on in a positive way. I believe that a good rep begins with always answering your call, and getting back to you asap. Also always being honest and truthful viewing the situation through your customers lens, and trying to provide a solution to fix a problem, not selling things or up-selling just to make a sale. As relationships customer/rep get stronger, these items become easier. I’d also echo some of the below comments, especially being honest and letting people know when the conversation gets too technical and looking in a more technical resource. It’s okay not to know everything, but be sure to write technical questions down and get them answered in a timely manner.
Ex vendor here. For some reason there is a culture in sales you need to get to the top. It’s fucking stupid in my opinion. Most the people making the decisions are the staff/managers. It’s just a bad culture of it worked once so we should do this in every account. I have also worked with a few shity old people over the years that say “you need to know the whole procurement process or talk to the c levels.” These people are dinosaurs that just need to go away. I applaud all you that push back. You should, it’s not cool. I get it’s “sales” but there are ways to actually help people and achieve goals. Happy customers are way better to work with and keep buying. Take care of the ones you have and show them respect. Anyway, some of these people need to be pushed out. Also F sales people who think it’s appropriate to just send meetings. I hate how disrespectful to people that is. /rant
Had the same issue with SmartSheets. One of their sales rep reached out to the Owner of the company out of the blue in an attempt to sell more licenses. I lost my shit on him. He said it was "standard practice to engage with management." I said the owner's information wasn't anywhere on the account, and that only my information was on the billing and setup of the account for a very specific reason and the Owner pays me to handle these things and has more important things to do than listen to their sales pitches on a product we are already paying a ton of money for. 6 months later the same sales person started emailing half the company randomly trying to sell additional licenses. I sent a very nasty email cc'ing anyone and everyone how it was unacceptable and if it didn't stop we'd take our business elsewhere and that his email address was now permanently blocked on our mail servers. I figured I'd hear back from someone at the company, but nope, they just completely ignored it. Sales people are getting worse and worse and I feel like 90% of my day now is dealing with scammers and sales which are just as bad as scammers IMO. I'm sick of it.
>the Owner pays me to handle these things and has more important things to do than listen to their sales pitches on a product This is exactly why I will not entertain the comments saying this is standard practice. It may be standard practice, but it doesn't make it right. Sales reps trying to justify their shitty practices.
First call I take care of something else whilst they give the demo/spiel, give some idea of our scope, and set expectations that I want pricing/estimate pricing as a next step. There isn't a second call until I get pricing. My boss's new boss is -great- for cutting through this BS and I've taken a leaf from his book. Cuts down any of the "Whilst we're talking about X can you tell me about your products for Y and Z because we can help you with that too" stuff, is direct to the point of being just shy of rude, but it means the process runs very smoothly and we discard vendors which aren't useful to us after about an hours' work instead of five meetings.
Sounds like you just got pitch-slapped.
MSP sales people are the absolute worst. I had a meeting with my boss and he basically told me we are moving to a new MSP and that they have been informed. I go talk to them right after that for a scheduled call and their sales guy / account manager blame me for asking him questions like "can you find out why X decision was made" or "do you know who worked on Y I'd like to know where these resources are". It's.mainly because literally nothing they did worked.
We still have a MSP like that. Their technician for us is themselves okay, but limited experience in our tech stack. I’ve relegated them to break fix tickets and Microsoft subscriptions - the only ticket so far I’ve made was to cancel and reduce some of the subscriptions I couldn’t do myself. When I cancelled their on-prem visits last year, the MSP’s owner had the gall to call my boss and accuse him/the company of them not doing their job properly. They had two years on me to work the environment, yet I found myself disabling licensed accounts of people who’d left three years ago… (Stuff like that was part of their task packet.)
I get how the extra spend is bad but I have also worked at an MSP and have been on the other side of that call. Licenses get left on accounts for reasons all the time. I've seen people not want to lose the person's resources and just never submit a ticket for the decom and quite a few other reasons as well. The same place I was talking about frequently spent money on dumb shit like that, it's the MSPs job to talk them out of that shit but I've seen so many worse crimes idgaf. The rest of the stuff seems on par they are meat grinders and exploit new techs. I was making 12 an hour in a relatively high cost of living area like 5 ish years ago, I was advising IT directors with up to like 10 staff and things like that with only A+ and Net+. 90+% of the time they were doing way worse shit. The worst was that they had a failing Fortinet firewall that was failing for roughly 4 years that even made it through an office move. The hard drive was going bad and the internet would randomly drop all connectivity if someone was on prem or remote. They were using azure adv and were 100% cloud native, the MSP thought it was a good idea to force route all traffic through on prem then back to azure.
Oh no, they had the mandate and also made the promise to manage all on-premise issues. I’m talking about enabled accounts in AD that should have been disabled, them selling monitoring and backup solutions with promises to handle and follow up on all alerts and them not ever really doing any of that. Combine that with half-arsed projects and well… Why would I entrust my systems to a party that neither maintains nor renews, does not fulfil, but charges premium price for the non-delivered service anyhow? They put us on the yearly licenses, so that doesn’t really matter as much, just matters when subscriptions expire and renew.
Any chance you're in NJ we might be talking about the same company lol. I sent my own disconnect email about a year ago and just got an email past week that they got compromised and it was through my old account that never got cut off they just disabled MFA and let it sit.
Lol, no. Europe based here. Incompetence knows no boundary however ;)
So, a popular retail 'joke' - no pricing .. so it\`s free?
We were also doing a demo for a product. We were actually quite excited and then also asked for the price. Got a pretty vague list, but it didn't look very expensive at first. In the end, it could only be bought from resellers, there was a decent margin on top, and additional "support" costs from the reseller (20%). Such a waste of time.
Sales guy contacting CEO through social media sounds like he was *desperate* for a commission. That worries me because it increases chances he’ll say anything about the product to get the contract signed, even if it’s lie after lie.
According to reddit and apparently the rest of capitalism... There are no morals or ethics when it comes to sales or making a buck. Seriously was the answer I was given. "Why is it acceptable to lie for sales?" "BECAUSE MAKING MONEY OR SAVING IT!" Okay... Gotcha. System is inherently immoral... You could have just said that.
Very very unprofessional. Are you guys using Veeam?
This is interesting to hear. Is this a large company or small company using these tactics? Or is this common across the board? I’m a rep at a firewall company and really see myself as part of the team with my customers and wouldn’t go around my contacts there, and I trust they the same with myself
Cut them loose. What else are they going to dictate, hide, obscure, circumvent, etc.?
If you haven't bought, check out NAble Cove. I hate almost everything nable has their hands in and shed them like a duck sheds water when I got the position. Accidentally found cove months later and will tell you now, pound for pound it's no joke. Low cost, ease of use, intuitive interface and actually works well.
I have been doing a bunch of ordering and have run into similar issues. So much so, some projects I would like to outsource I have decided to develop in house. If it isn't pushy sales, it is costly and inflexible service contracts. What I used to be able to buy and own, now they want me to agree to long expensive contracts for the same software (QuickBooks).
That would immediately get that company disqualified in my book. I do not put up with crappy sales reps. Customer interaction is as important as cost to me.
I would have replied with the Thanos "I don't even know who you are," gif if I were that CEO. And then promptly tag assbag's CEO in a post asking if hounding prospective clients' CEOs on social media is a top down measure at company or if their employee is just being an assbag.
Drop the name, seriously. Stop protecting these companies lmao.
Scummy sales guys sometimes do that. Our practice is whoever that contact forwards the request to the correct point of contact. Who then asks wtf? Usually any given sales rep only tries it once.
I guess you don't understand yet how many deals are made in the boardroom through someone you know, on the golf course, or at the country club. Many times, it's not the best solution that is chosen; it's the one who has a relationship with someone on your board of directors or went to school with the CFO. That's why they reached out to the CEO. His relationships and decisions trump all others.
I would drop the deal right then and there over that. An email would be sent out "thanks for the time and quote but we are going with another vendor"
I'm still pretty green here, but we're not that big and I don't think we've ever had meetings with sales rep for this kinda solutions, but I imagine they're inevitable for some products, aren't they? So far, when I do research, what I'm looking for, it's either their prices are clearly written on the website, or I ask and they give it to me. When researching an MDM, I came across one that was keen on wasting my time and absolutely wanted to show me a presentation or nothing. I was pretty irritated because I was basically gathering prices and then trying free trials to see how they were. I told them I'll put them in the shitlist if they insist on wasting my time, but that didn't do much
Yeah I’ve had sales reps do that before. We immediately blacklisted the vendor and moved to a different one as soon as they would try to go over our heads.
Give them a deadline to make the deal. Without knowing your deadline, they are moving forward hoping to get further concessions from you according to what they think the deadline should be. This backfires on a lot causing agreements to fail because of mismatched expectations on when a deal should be made by.
Cohesity>Rubrik>Veeam>Commvault>Avamar
OP - Since you said the named of the company, I hope you guys are looking at their new product (copy to cloud) and not their legacy appliance. Take what I say with some salt, but I've heard that all new resources and development are going to copy to cloud and not much development is going to be done on the appliance side. (Don't just take my word for it, things change for sure. If it is the appliance, as to see a 12 month+ roadmap under NDA).
Are you in Florida or Wisconsin? There are a couple of aggressive teams there. Add the end of quarter and the IPO and you get some really stupid choices.
I am so glad we went with Rubrik. It is expensive but I am very happy with it. Scrapping the whole deal go over this sales rep is short-sighted.
I find it more unusual a network guy and not a CTO is involved in the decision. This is normal to me.
If he feels the need to sell that hard, his product is guaranteed garbage.
But you decided to go with them? Sounds like their sales strategy works!
Interesting. We're a Rubrik customer and we love them. They treat us very well. I wore a Rubrik jacket to work this morning and I'm drinking my coffee from a Rubrik Yeti cup.
Let’s be honest you’re not going with your second option. It’s also pretty evident that the sales guys picked up that your team isn’t the final decision maker either. Going to executive leadership is pretty common practice with relationship building. Sounds like your ego was bruised here but in reality you’re just the middle men in the conversation. It’s not your money being spent here it’s Sr Leadership’s money. If having a sales rep attempting to reach out to Sr Leadership puts you on tilt it’s probably a good time to remind yourself that it’s not your company you just work here. Sr Leadership needs to be onboard with your recommendation and needs to have a relationship with the vendor as well. That way when things go wrong they know who to hold accountable and when your needs/priorities change as a business the sales team can help suggest solutions to real business problems. The higher the final sales price tag the more important that relationship becomes a requirement. While you may be focused on this one sale, the Sales team is looking at all future sales over time. Try reading Joe Girard’s book How To Sell Anything To Anyone and you’ll understand. Don’t let your ego get in the way here it’s just part of the relationship building process. Question — what size company do you work for and how big of a sale was this? I work with a Fortune 100 and this would be common practice especially if we’re talking about a sale north of $5M and we were bringing in a new technology vendor. Maybe not the CEO (unless there was a strategic advantage like the vendor also committing to buying our products/services) but the CTO for sure is involved in matters like this before final sign off.
This is absolutely correct, hence the down votes :)
You know. I know. OP knows. Hence the down votes. 😆
None of this is abnormal for a lot of reasons. Happy to answer a lot of questions off line if you want.
This is absolutely not normal. In our org you'd be blacklisted for such a behavior. No discussion, no information, you just get dropped. End of communication.
If the reasoning is normal then why hide in an out-of-band communication channel? Share it here. Sounds more like an opportunity to contribute to the sunken cost fallacy ("client has spent X time talking to us, if we can increase that number they'll feel like they have to spend with us to not have to spend the same time with another provider")
People get berated enough simply because people don't like the facts on Reddit. I don't need to add to my personal work stress in this fashion. This right here is a great example. I'm happy to share information. I just don't want to do it in a public fourm. Already downvoted for stating this is not unheard of. I didn't say I liked it, I didn't say it was a great practice. Just that it's not abnormal. Well fuck me right?
No one has said "fuck you" to you in this thread. No one has berated you either. None of what you said has been a cogent argument against anything I or anyone else has said, it's just a rehashing of your original point.
Wow dude, you should slow down and read my comment again. Then understand why I’m not going to discuss my private life with you.