I have spoken with many salespeople in the past week.
In the past week, I have spoken with over a dozen salespeople (I sought pricing on business cellphone plans and a new photocopier). I have heard the phrase "I just wanted to touch base" many times. I have grown to have a great dislike of that phrase.
I do believe that every time I have heard "I just wanted to touch base" in the last seven days, it was prefaced by an interrupting phone call and followed by an annoying couple of minutes of a sales weasel not accepting my quite clear and simple statement of "Thank you for the quote, I am evaluating all of the options and will get back to you with questions, concerns, or with our decision." I wouldn't hold the phone call against them if I had not made it abundantly clear to each of these people that email is my preferred method of contact. Worse is that in most cases, it has taken more than a few such phone calls from each of them to get them to leave me alone.
So ignoring the sexual harassment angle of the phrase I am clearly starting
to associate the phrase with annoyance.
I was at a presentation the other night where several different vendors were presenting their "virtualization" (complaints about the creeping usage of the term virtualization by marketing people will be saved for another day) products to a group of mostly IT professionals.
After one company finished their presentation, I asked for general pricing information. The representative from marketing deflected my question and suggested I talk with them after the meeting. I could have spoken with them after the other presentations were finished, but I already knew all I needed to know. Their product was expensive, damned expensive. A quick search online confirms this -- pricing starts at $20k, and is realistically $50k for all the pieces anyone consider the product would actually want.
Now, this avoidance of public pricing was in direct contrast to another company;, who answered all of the basic pricing questions one might have with their last slide. They also have it clearly on their website. Good for them.
I wish marketing departments would realize that hiding the cost of their product only annoys technical people. Companies need to provide at public pricing that is at least in the correct ballpark of what I would pay. Sure, if they must they can do silly things like MAP pricing or have an MSRP that is noticeably more than customers actually pay. But at least it lets me get an understanding if I can even consider your product. If you hide your prices and you became legitimately interesting in the marketplace, your price lists will likely end up somewhere like Storage Mojo's Pricing Guide page.
So marketers, please don't waste my time or your time and let me at least figure out if your product is even within my budget before I have to talk to you.
