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The time to talk to sales reps is a real problem. I was at a startup, and this was a factor in pretty much all of the software we selected. This was a financial
by kevstev 6y ago
The time to talk to sales reps is a real problem. I was at a startup, and this was a factor in pretty much all of the software we selected. This was a financial app- we needed messaging of some sort. I called the leaders at that time, Tibco, 29West, etc. They all wanted to schedule meetings 3-5 days in the future to just talk about what we needed. My expectation is that we would have something basically working in 3-5 days. This is before we started haggling over contracts and pricing and all that.
We ended up using ActiveMQ, and literally that evening I had things talking to each other. No contracts, no hassle, just downloaded and got to work.
A bit more on-topic in regards to IBM though- we buy licenses from them directly, and the past few months they have sent kind of bizarre emails saying I could save money if I bought them through a third party partner. I just forwarded the mail to the finance guys, but I can't imagine why IBM would introduce a middle man into our relationship with them and how that additional layer in between could end up saving us money.
- bitexploder 6y agoIBM does channel sales. They don’t want to maintain a sales force. They want to maintain channel partners and VARS. They will discount you because they need your money flowing thru VARS to keep everyone happy in their ecosystem. So they need to incentivize everyone to go through their partners. So they will charge you more if you are direct to them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tgflynn 6y ago> They don’t want to maintain a sales force. Wow, I didn't realize their culture had changed that much. They were a sales oriented company since the days of Thomas Watson Sr.
- bitexploder 6y agoMany big B2B sales orgs are all channel or heavily channel now. Just the way it is these days.
- kjs3 6y agoThey had and have a large/enterprise customer sales culture. There were few SMB sales for IBM back in TWSr's days (how small a mainframe do you want? Still costs a mint.)[1] and now that IBM has SMB product to sell, they aren't interested in the building out a sales org to address that market[2]. So they've done what almost everyone else has done and outsourced that to a channel. [1] Yes I know IBM used to sell everything down to the pens and pencils, but virtually always to support some very expensive other purchase. [2] Yes I know IBM has things called "SMB sales" or some variation. From my experience at IBM, they were either targeting some specific product/market combo, or they were a bad joke; not exactly the A-team. YMMV.