I could never be a salesman. I don't think I have the patience for it, for one. I don't have the ability to walk up to people I don't know and initiate meaningless small talk (much less meaningful small talk). I have to fumble around and think about what I could or should say, and usually by the time I've worked up the nerve to initiate something, I have no follow-up. Also, I am a wee bit too cynical and sarcastic to spread the sunshine on some unsuspecting customer. On my last evaluation from my boss, under the heading of Integrity, he put "Too Honest." Frankly, I don't know if that's a compliment or a slam, but since he gave me a 10/10, we'll call it a compliment. The closest I get to being a salesman is eBay.
So anyway, a significant part of my job is dealing with salespeople. When I'm working on a project and I know I need a server with four CPUs and 32GB of RAM, I'm know I'm going to wade into a feeding frenzy of four or five salesguys who want my business, and I'm fine with that. It's days like today that I find it difficult to be civil.
Sometimes I exaggerate when I say that I am multitasking (working on several things at once), but not this week. I have been rebuilding a SQL Server from backups for our ERP upgrade, configuring my Oracle test server for the third time, getting server specs and pricing for a project to upgrade one of our web portals, reviewing lease contracts to plan for the 2007 budget year, testing a financial reporting application with our new ERP software, rebuilding three data import packages from scratch that blew up when the user account of the developer who built them was disabled, making a decision about how many desktop computers to buy this month, troubleshooting a SQL Reporting Services installation that has stopped working, compiling capital expenditure requests for 2007, figuring out how to replace the cell phones of the editors at one of our remote offices with Blackberrys (Blackberries?) without the company actually paying for them, and trying to get a quote from a vendor for a UPS and generator to replace what we have in our data center. That's just the stuff that I can recall as I sit here, and it's been a short week! Needless to say, at the end of the last two days I've been mentally drained.
Enter the cold sales call. We have caller ID at work, so when I see the numbers for some of my vendors come up and I know I don't have the wherewithal to speak to them, I let the call roll over to voice mail. But today I was expecting a call from the aforementioned UPS vendor, and I made the mistake of answering a call from [salesguy] over at [big box computer vendor]. So the first thing he asks me is, "what's going on?" Now at this point, if [salesguy] had been in front of me I would probably have strangled him with the phone cord, but I believe I said something like, "uh, lots of things." This of course was the cue for [salesguy] to jump in like a superhero and ask if there was anything I needed. I said, "Yeah, I need someone who knows Oracle better than I do so I can get this Oracle project off my plate." He says, "Really? We can set you up with that!" And I say, "Well, the only problem is that there's no money to pay for it." That kind of deflated him. Then I ran down most of the projects I mentioned above, none of which he could do anything to help me with. (I didn't mention the desktops, because he is never the low cost provider and it wastes my time and his).
Anyway, eventually I was able to get him off the phone and try to focus back on whatever I was doing at the time. Net result? Five to 10 minutes wasted on a meaningless phone call, and another couple of minutes delving back into the work I had to drop to talk to him. Don't these guys know that if there's something I can throw off on them, that I'm going to call them? Like I'm over here trying to hoard all the work. This salesguy's problem is that he's nearly always much more expensive than everyone else, so he never gets business from me. So he thinks he needs to call more often because I need personal contact. See I can't even empathize with the salesguy. That's why I could never be one.
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