After working a few vendors and being a customer a few times too, I come to find FUD wars almost FUN. I was talking to a potential customer, that will remain nameless, during a follow-up RFP session about Vendor bashing. They specifically asked each vendor what questions they would want to have them ask the other vendors competing for the business. This of course opened the flood gates for my competition. Most of it was directed toward each other, but some of it came my way. I told the customer, let’s just get all 3 vendors in a room together and we can get everything on the table, and while we are at it, let us do a face-to-face bake-off of all three solutions.

Of course, this isn’t going to happen, mainly because I’m 6?3? 240 and no one would want it to get too out of control. (just kidding, not about me, but about getting out of control).

So here I am, wondering how far should someone go in a FUN campaign. I personally stay with a factual campaign, about why the solution I am proposing is the right solution for the customer. Why I chose to work for a vendor based on extensive research of all of the competition. Why I would chose the same solution if I was going to deploy this technology for my own business. What I have fund with FUD is that it is in general based on truth, but twisted in order to make something simple seem devious, something complex to hold less value.

When competing against EMC while I was working at StorageTek everything started out as basic speeds, feeds, and price for storage. EMC would talk about how STK isn’t a disk storage company, and that the technology being proposed isn’t tried and trusted. They would talk about customers that had failures, or that the OEM was LSI. StorageTek would talk about long Professional Services engagements to get the storage installed, or that customers were NOT allowed to make any changes to the storage, only certified field engineers from EMC could do that. We would bring up tales of the “perfect storm” when an EMC customer would try to implement those 3 features that had never been tested together and would crash the disk subsystem. All of this got our customer base confused, and upset. Not because they put a serious amount of weight into the things that were said, but rather because they would be equally disappointed in the vendors for playing dirty.

I actually have a customer who chose a vendor because they wouldn’t play the FUD game. They wouldn’t launch a dirty sales process.

What are your thoughts on this?

Another issue I just ran into was a DMR bashing a product line because they knew they were no longer going to carry it, and as a result would lose out on the revenue. Believe it or not, they out-right LIED. To me that DMR is dead to me, and I don’t think I’ll ever work with them again.

As always comments welcome.

Read it.  Should be an interesting few weeks/months as this deal pans out.  Much different exit strategy then an IPO, but it really looks like a good move for both companies.  Hello DELL…looks like I’ll be getting a new laptop!

Powered by Qumana