Greg YoungThis topic could be a blog unto itself. I liked the comment from Steve L. about ‘experts’.
I’ll end my 3 part series today with a pragmatic one: opaque proposals. I see hundreds of these each year from our Gartner customers. One line proposals with nothing more than a part numbers and a 6 or 7 figure amount after. Sometimes the vendor name. Customers don’t want a binder, but at least describe in a few words what the customer is buying.
In the lifecycle phase after we have helped with needs (“do I”)and selection (“with whom”, I take a lot of calls where, armed with the bill of goods and advise customers on whether what they are buying is indeed what they identified in their requirements and is it priced competitively.
But here is the little something extra. This isn’t (just) about being nice to your customer: this stuff stops deals for vendors and deployments for enterprises. I speak often with procurement staff who have rightfully put the brakes on the hurried (“you are either with us in the fight against hackers and the Russian mafia, or you are delaying this purchase and are with the hackers and the Russian mafia.”) yet cryptic purchase of SCU1914383-2525-09-456-YOO (“its technical – you won’t understand”).
To procurement officers who haven’t called me, just say “I’m pretty sure SCU1914383-2525-09-456-YOO is the single port 5U 1 mbps token-ring model. I sure hope that is the one you want since we can’t return it” and you’ll get the proposal Description section converted to human readable format.
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1 response so far ↓
1 Cristian Niculae February 8, 2010 at 6:42 am
I can not imagine a customer that will buy a product present in a price offer with only the SKU and nothing else.
As a sales person, one should think that presenting the information like this is an easy way to loose a possible customer.