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.
1.13.2009
1.06.2009
The absurdity of Best/Worst lists
I’m sure I’m not the only person to believe that “Best of” lists are a marketing gimmick. The respected food or movie critic, of course, proffers a list of his or her favorite restaurants or films; that’s the stated purpose of the column or article. It’s also intuitive that an editorial staff can select the “best” stories of the year under the same clearly defined auspices of their vocation. Consumer advocates can safely maintain objectivity by publishing and adhering to the criteria used to evaluate products. Where we go off track is with the pseudoscientific crowd that purports to insert some objectivity into the subjective process of ranking the non-quantifiable.
Take, for instance, an article in today’s WSJ purporting to describe the “best and worst jobs in the U.S.” The article is based on a study that measures “five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and stress.” The study doesn’t divulge how they’re measured, but from a quantitative standpoint, I don’t see any reasonable way to objectively measure environment, physical demands, or stress. Income (of course) and outlook are readily quantifiable, but when 60% of your criteria are subjective, how can you make any kind of objective claim?
I’m just sayin’.
The error of these types of stories is not that they exist, but that they are presented as scientific. They’ve got one guy, author of a book entitled “Jobs Rated Almanac” and some Bureau of Labor stats. From this we are led to assign some validity, as though we were perusing a peer-reviewed article in Nature. In reality we have one man’s opinion on a bunch of subjective stuff. For example, the study’s website lists 21 “stress” factors that combine to give each rated job a stress rating, but these too are subjective: “Working the public eye” may be a negative for some but a strong positive for others; ditto Competitiveness, Advocacy, Outdoor work, and many others.
Best jobs for whom? From the looks of this list, it’s someone who likes numbers (Mathematician is #1, Actuary is #2, Statistician is #3). The Left-brain set, apparently, has it made. I can think of any number of folks (myself included) who would place these types of positions near the bottom of their lists of preferred jobs. In my case, it’s not because I hate math (although there certainly was a fair amount of innumeracy in the first 16 of my 18 years of formal education). It’s rather what I discovered in graduate school about quantitative science: apply it, and things come alive. I’m sure that many of us use numbers in our work, but few of us really dig the numbers for themselves. (My dad the engineering professor is an exception; I really do think he has a tremendous admiration for numerical systems, whereas so many of us merely benefit from them.)
But it’s not just numerophobes that are left out in the cold by this study. I once had a very successful sales colleague who pulled down well over $150,000 a year. He loved his job, had great work-life balance, and is now making even more money working for one of the biggest technology companies in the country; he’s exceeded quota every quarter he’s been there and will likely continue to be successful and satisfied. Yet his job is not high on the list. My friend once confided to me that he could never go back to “sitting behind a desk”, which seems to describe the majority of the top 20 jobs listed. Granted, we can contrast my friend with a somewhat less successful counterpart in another state, who was so lost as to his role as a salesman that he literally drove around town looking for big office buildings on which to cold call before his employer finally quit giving him advances on his commissions.
The point of these examples is, of course, that different people have different criteria to match their requirements and abilities. To somehow mold the whole working populace into a single expression of priorities, capacities and desires is absurd. But it catches the eye; so long as it’s couched plausibly, the readership will ascribe some validity (“leading expert in the field…government statistics” sounds better than “some guy who wrote a book…subjective measurements”). Job satisfaction is a fairly minor issue in an economy where most of us are merely glad to have a job, but I have no doubt that this type of pseudoscience will continue to make inroads into more substantial issues, so long as there are gullible readers to be found, even among the financial geeks in the WSJ readership. Thanks, Rupert! I can already see the improvement since the Journal joined the News Corp fold.
Take, for instance, an article in today’s WSJ purporting to describe the “best and worst jobs in the U.S.” The article is based on a study that measures “five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and stress.” The study doesn’t divulge how they’re measured, but from a quantitative standpoint, I don’t see any reasonable way to objectively measure environment, physical demands, or stress. Income (of course) and outlook are readily quantifiable, but when 60% of your criteria are subjective, how can you make any kind of objective claim?
I’m just sayin’.
The error of these types of stories is not that they exist, but that they are presented as scientific. They’ve got one guy, author of a book entitled “Jobs Rated Almanac” and some Bureau of Labor stats. From this we are led to assign some validity, as though we were perusing a peer-reviewed article in Nature. In reality we have one man’s opinion on a bunch of subjective stuff. For example, the study’s website lists 21 “stress” factors that combine to give each rated job a stress rating, but these too are subjective: “Working the public eye” may be a negative for some but a strong positive for others; ditto Competitiveness, Advocacy, Outdoor work, and many others.
Best jobs for whom? From the looks of this list, it’s someone who likes numbers (Mathematician is #1, Actuary is #2, Statistician is #3). The Left-brain set, apparently, has it made. I can think of any number of folks (myself included) who would place these types of positions near the bottom of their lists of preferred jobs. In my case, it’s not because I hate math (although there certainly was a fair amount of innumeracy in the first 16 of my 18 years of formal education). It’s rather what I discovered in graduate school about quantitative science: apply it, and things come alive. I’m sure that many of us use numbers in our work, but few of us really dig the numbers for themselves. (My dad the engineering professor is an exception; I really do think he has a tremendous admiration for numerical systems, whereas so many of us merely benefit from them.)
But it’s not just numerophobes that are left out in the cold by this study. I once had a very successful sales colleague who pulled down well over $150,000 a year. He loved his job, had great work-life balance, and is now making even more money working for one of the biggest technology companies in the country; he’s exceeded quota every quarter he’s been there and will likely continue to be successful and satisfied. Yet his job is not high on the list. My friend once confided to me that he could never go back to “sitting behind a desk”, which seems to describe the majority of the top 20 jobs listed. Granted, we can contrast my friend with a somewhat less successful counterpart in another state, who was so lost as to his role as a salesman that he literally drove around town looking for big office buildings on which to cold call before his employer finally quit giving him advances on his commissions.
The point of these examples is, of course, that different people have different criteria to match their requirements and abilities. To somehow mold the whole working populace into a single expression of priorities, capacities and desires is absurd. But it catches the eye; so long as it’s couched plausibly, the readership will ascribe some validity (“leading expert in the field…government statistics” sounds better than “some guy who wrote a book…subjective measurements”). Job satisfaction is a fairly minor issue in an economy where most of us are merely glad to have a job, but I have no doubt that this type of pseudoscience will continue to make inroads into more substantial issues, so long as there are gullible readers to be found, even among the financial geeks in the WSJ readership. Thanks, Rupert! I can already see the improvement since the Journal joined the News Corp fold.
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