People Unclear on the Concept

At various times in my career I’ve sold IT stuff. Sometimes it was hardware, sometimes software. I always liked selling hardware best. It is what it is. There’s less propensity for weaseling. A SAN disk array, for instance, either has a raw capacity of 20 terabytes, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, you whip out the brochure for the next biggest model and commence your upsell. (Perhaps this explains why I no longer sell stuff; I like straightforward, honest communication, and sometimes I’d have to choke something back when a member of my sales team made some outrageous claim of the product we were pitching.)

Software, on the other hand, can be anything to anyone, via the golden ticket of Professional Services. “Does it do this?” “Uh, yeah, our consulting guys can add some code to do that.” Translation: “Multiply the price you see on this quote by four.”

My company is currently looking to buy some software. Maybe. Personally I’m skeptical that the deal can be done in the current business climate, but this isn’t stopping our management from looking at the issue. Which means that I, along with other folks, have the pleasure of sitting through several hours-long presentations and demos. I’ve been favorably impressed with some of the vendors and their options, but one in particular just doesn’t seem to understand what we’re looking for in the way of pre-sales.

For instance, last month they invited all our technical people to a briefing where the ostensible purpose was to demo and discuss the functionality of the software. Instead, we were treated to a death-by-PowerPoint presentation that explained:

1. How great the company was
2. A list of all their products, 27 of which were of zero interest to us
3. A list of 362 business challenges their software meets
4. A hardware product briefing

In short, their client executive took a canned overview briefing and tried to pawn it off as a demo and technical discussion. Our management team was not amused, and sent them packing after the first 90 minutes. (Well, the hardware guys stayed on for another hour, but most of us bailed). So the vendor calls us up after Christmas and says, yes, they are sorry, they learned their lesson, they will have a product demo and technical session ready to roll, just tell them when.

Yesterday was when. The team shows up and the first thing they bring up is a PowerPoint presentation. Three slides in, it’s clear we are getting:

1. How great the company is
2. A list of all their products, 27 of which are of zero interest to us
3. A list of 362 business challenges their software meets

At least this time they left off the hardware briefing. Actually, they did in fact have a demo as well. This lasted for about 30 minutes, after which they hurriedly shut it down, as if it was going to crash and cause shame and disgrace to the whole contingent. As soon as the demo was shut down, we returned to PowerPoint purgatory for another two hours, complete with animated graphics and sliding boxes. (Whatever happened to the bulleted list? Instead we have these sentences in colored boxes that slide around the screen like flying saucers over Roswell. Enough, already; just put the info in a bulleted list, please!)

The sad thing is that, from what little I saw in the demo, this product actually looks like a contender. It seems to have most of what we need, and there seemed to be a relatively small amount of weaseling present in the salesguy’s answers. If the marketing people and their PowerPoint decks would ever get out of the way, we might actually go with this vendor. They just need to realize that we are an informed audience. It’s like showing up at a new car lot and having the salesperson show you the wonders of the automatic transmission. And that occurs only after you’ve talked him into showing you the right vehicle. First you have to spend an hour convincing him that you need a minivan, not a Hummer.

I have to admit a preference for the vendor who sent an engineer to do a demo last month. The first words out of her mouth: “I don’t have any PowerPoints today. We’ll spend the entire time working with the product.” Maybe she worked for a hardware vendor in a past life.