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Is the steak dinner and alcohol-fueled (and I'll throw in golf) contract negotiation real? I keep hearing about it on HN comments but my experience with enterpr

Is the steak dinner and alcohol-fueled (and I'll throw in golf) contract negotiation real? I keep hearing about it on HN comments but my experience with enterprise sales has been almost the complete opposite. Lots of meetings on Zoom and occasionally a drink at industry events.

billbrown 2y ago
The Salesforce account executives will definitely drop by before or around negotiations and take decision makers to dinner. They'll even host a Top Golf evening for the team, just to put faces with names. eyeroll
ethbr1 2y ago
Oh yeah, although probably less steak now than used to be. But enterprise sales is always (and will forever be) sales. Caveat: the further you get into non-tech, as a customer base, the more prevalent this is. On the tech side, there's at least a thin veneer of objectivity (often masking a quiet steak dinner, in which the actual solution was picked).
xp84 2y ago
I heard it firsthand from my last company's head of digital marketing, who was the most key decision maker in that area there. These Salesforce sales guys, it seems, are able to spend lavishly on literal wining and dining, which is probably very effective in terms of getting them to win over other teams on why they should add on (insert SF service here) to increase deal size. The last negotiation I was there for, for instance, in late 2021, the SF guys were pitching (hard) a product called "Salesforce Einstein" which was promised to be everything to everyone. I see they are now calling it "AI" which wasn't the main way they described it then before AI was such a hot buzzword. I think it was just branding for some kind of marketing workflow tooling, but to hear them tell it, it would do anything we could imagine.
Atotalnoob 2y ago
I don’t know about sales force, but once you get high enough, vendors will spend tens of thousands on meals, tickets to conferences, etc to win you over and keep you. The current place I work will call up Microsoft, databricks, or someone else and have them pay for a hackathon with ~100 participants including catered meals and dinners out for a week. I sat next to one vendor, I saw the total bill for the dinner (30k). He didn’t flinch and slapped down his Amex

billbrown 2y ago

The Salesforce account executives will definitely drop by before or around negotiations and take decision makers to dinner. They'll even host a Top Golf evening for the team, just to put faces with names. eyeroll

ethbr1 2y ago

Oh yeah, although probably less steak now than used to be. But enterprise sales is always (and will forever be) sales. Caveat: the further you get into non-tech, as a customer base, the more prevalent this is. On the tech side, there's at least a thin veneer of objectivity (often masking a quiet steak dinner, in which the actual solution was picked).

xp84 2y ago

I heard it firsthand from my last company's head of digital marketing, who was the most key decision maker in that area there. These Salesforce sales guys, it seems, are able to spend lavishly on literal wining and dining, which is probably very effective in terms of getting them to win over other teams on why they should add on (insert SF service here) to increase deal size. The last negotiation I was there for, for instance, in late 2021, the SF guys were pitching (hard) a product called "Salesforce Einstein" which was promised to be everything to everyone. I see they are now calling it "AI" which wasn't the main way they described it then before AI was such a hot buzzword. I think it was just branding for some kind of marketing workflow tooling, but to hear them tell it, it would do anything we could imagine.

Atotalnoob 2y ago

I don’t know about sales force, but once you get high enough, vendors will spend tens of thousands on meals, tickets to conferences, etc to win you over and keep you. The current place I work will call up Microsoft, databricks, or someone else and have them pay for a hackathon with ~100 participants including catered meals and dinners out for a week. I sat next to one vendor, I saw the total bill for the dinner (30k). He didn’t flinch and slapped down his Amex