<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/7/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">James O'Kane</b> <<a href="mailto:jo2y@midnightlinux.com">jo2y@midnightlinux.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
This is the part I hated about talking to vendors. We were spec'ing<br>air-conditioning units at a previous job, and one of the vendors called to<br>see if I want to get lunch. I didn't like the guy's personality, so when I
<br>declined he started begging. He said if we didn't get lunch, he wouldn't<br>get to eat. I've also turned down tickets to sporting events from disk<br>array vendor because they weren't something I was interested in.
<br>Do things like this sway technical people's purchasing decisions?</blockquote><div><br>I don't mind going out to lunch with vendors, because if they want to give me a sales pitch, they're not going to do it during my regular working time. You want some of my time to advance your business, I might be game, but its going to be a time when I normally wouldn't be doing work, like at lunch. Does it sway my decision? It might. But I won't let the fact that someone paid $20 for my lunch influence a $10,000 purchase.
<br><br></div></div>The thing I hate is this. They give you a quote for some big ticket item. You shop around a little, and say "well, I can get this other thing from some other company." And so they come back and give you a quote that beats their original price.
<br><br>So you do a couple of iterations of that, and when its time to buy, you're thinking "They would have gone lower. I'm getting ripped off." And don't ask me what my budget is. I had someone ask me what my budget was, and I told him, and voila, he came in literally a penny under my budget. I didn't give him my business out of principle.
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