alt Hacker NewsI remember working at a company where we used a vendor extensively in their mid-tier plan. We wanted an enterprise plan with more features, so we reached out to buy it.
So, their salesperson was shooting a penalty with no goalkeeper: All they needed to do was send an offer, and we would negotiate and close the deal.
Instead, they called my CTO multiple times, all at awkward times, like during his lunch. When he didn't pick up, they started calling HIS WIFE. The CTO eventually unplugged the vendor, and we had to find an alternative.
Ironically, another competing vendor we contacted did the same: they never stopped calling, they never wanted to schedule a proper meeting by email, and when you picked up, they didn't want you to hang up, even when you were busy.
I don't know how sales in tech can be so bad. Not even car dealers are like that. If I see a form stating, "Contact us for pricing," I am never doing it. I don't want to be grilled for 30 minutes on BDE calls: "Can you even pay us?" and then another hour of death by PowerPoint until they finally give you a price. That is, if they don't spam calls first.
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The datadog sales team would do that kind of things to us, which basically led to us banning them from even consideration.
This made me recall a sales interaction with a company myself. Somehow a sales person from a company noticed we were in the market for an somewhat expensive product their company was selling.
They always called during lunch hours (three times). When I finally had a short moment, there was (1) nothing substantial the sales person could tell me about their products or their prices, (2) they had no idea how we (public sector) have to buy things and wanted me to make an exception and when I asked them to just email me their offer to my publicly available email address (3) they didn't.
By that point that company would have been better off not having a sales person. And that type of experience was up to today nearly the only thing that happened with sales, except for one time where the company sent a technician to have a look at our circumstances which worked great.
I've had even worse. We wanted to buy a product and couldn't do so on our own, so I left my contact information on their "speak to a sales person" form.
No response for a week. So I emailed an email address that was included in the onboarding email.
No response for another week. So I sent their CEO a message on LinkedIn. Hey, I really want to buy, let's talk.
No response for another week (and four months later). So I gave up.