The Hard Sell is the Devil (or Do Your Damned Homework, You Lazy Software Bum)

Photo credit: wike via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
Software Wars” by Steven Hilton is licensed under CC BY-SA

 

Sometimes, you get an asshole selling enterprise IT solutions who won’t take no for an answer and you have to stop being nice. When I was working HR, it was fascinating to me that people selling HRIS systems couldn’t grasp the concept of centralized authorizations and enterprise wide conformity for large corporate HR processes. Really, sales people trying to push HRIS packages to huge corporations repeatedly needed that explained. There are no words. (sigh)

Please, if you are in software sales and perform cold-calls, visits, emails and generally plan on making yourself a nuisance, do your damned homework before attempting the hard sell. No, I won’t give you the name, email and phone number of the right person either. Well, not unless they’ve pissed me off recenlty. 🙂

Anyway, this is as nice as I get when the eleventieth email and/or phone call comes in from the same Doesn’t Learn Fast jackass:

“Okay, we’ve been through this before and I’m declining – again. Let me guess, you saw that I work at xxxxxx in DC, mistakenly assumed the DC location is the headquarters and assumed I am in a position to make decisions about enterprise solutions for problems that I don’t actually manage (or experience) at this location. Now, you are trying the hard sell approach by talking about our “competitors” (do you know who they actually are?) by insisting (repeatedly) on a meeting that makes no sense for either of us.

You might want to do some research on our company, what we actually do as a business model and where we do it before attempting the hard sell to a tiny project site with no authority to make enterprise wide decisions on contracting for services for a company with offices on several continents. No, the company is not losing money because I didn’t take time out of my busy schedule (negatively impacting my productivity) to meet with you in person to explain – AGAIN – why we don’t need your services. No, you don’t actually know how your services will give us an advantage over our competitors, since you clearly don’t even know what we do if you think your service is the missing ingredient in our success.”

In other words, go play in traffic.

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