Ah, finally an explanation of why marketing material is total crap and I have to talk to a clueless idiot who doesn't know any technical details, or will make incorrect technical promises.
Thanks "funnel". I hate you.
Sincerely,
Every Sysadmin who ever had to buy anything.
As someone with both technical knowledge and purchasing power, I've run into this frustration as well.
It's always pretty easy though to say "we like your product, but we want more information as to integration possibilities. Can you put us in touch with someone on your technical staff so we can ask these questions?"
Everyone company I've run into will at least give you an email contact, and all of the smaller ones (less than 20 persons employed) will just transfer you to the tech department directly.
I've done this with everything from hardware purchases to $7000/per cpu database software.
As someone with technical knowledge and no purchasing power, I dislike talking to salespeople and technical people. I just want the name of a product that I can recommend to my boss. I want that datasheet.
I recently tried to recommend a great product to my boss. I had used it in a past job, and I knew what company made it, but I had no idea what the actual product was called. I didn't want to waste my boss's time, so I tried to do the research on my own and figure out what specific product I was looking for.
Their website wasn't very helpful, it was filled with generic product names and an amalgamation of SEO-friendly keywords and the word "solution". I emailed them to find out which product I was looking for, and next thing I knew I was on a sales call. Then I was on a sales conference call. Then they popped in for a sales meeting, even though I never told them my company's address.
I came away with a vague idea that their products were both nameless and probably very good. I explained it all to my boss; he took a pass.
I could've saved everyone a lot of time if I just had that comprehensive datasheet.
I was tasked with finding a compute cluster for a small gov contractor research lab. I spoke with IBM, Sun, SGI, Dell you name it. None could inform me more than their brochures. Then I filled a form on LinuxHPC website. Quotes from smaller vendors started coming, most just VARs for the big boys. Except one shop in the midwest: those guys didn't waste any time, the entire team dialed us in and we could ask each specialist about the product. Even the cabinet maker dude who made the rugged, wheeled storage units for DoD; some other guy who could water-proof computers to stupid levels, etc.
Sigh, I'll miss the days when America made stuff :-|
This is why most companies need a 'talk to an engineer' instead of a sales person for those who want the details. From my understanding a few soft/hard tech companies do this with engineer rotations as you could learn a lot from talking to perspective customers (who knew!).
The 'funnel' is not the problem, it's the blindness that is. With sufficient information, chose the right competing funnels, and let sales carry you the rest of the way. With insufficient information, it's more like a 'meat grinder' than a funnel.
So don't hate the funnel, hate the bad marketing material that has no technical relevance to your concerns, and the clueless sales force that does its clients a disservice every time they answer a question or make a technical promise.
Summary: A marketing guy accidentally made an advertisement too informative, which made the useless, overpaid sales staff unhappy. A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers.
The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment).
Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.
Wrong. If you read carefully, it said (and I believe it's true) that the datasheet will not sell the product. Also true, it will actually be more likely to lose customers because some detail doesn't match the customer's goals.
For products above $100K, having a sales person who can actually listen to what the customer wants, and tailor their pitch appropriately, is worth millions. No "useless, overpaid sales staff".
Of course, your mileage varies greatly in sales :-)
I would have thought a customer not purchasing the product because it doesn't meet their requirements (or some part of their requirements) is a net win. If the OP was correct that his technical specifications were exhaustive and accurate, a prospective purchaser would be in a good position to make the purchasing decision.
Are we now encouraging sales through obfuscation and sales-person trickery?
Wrong lesson. The story was telling you something about how b2b sales work.
EDIT: Also, since every sales force everywhere runs on commission, it's impossible for them to be overpaid unless they don't sell anything (in which case they're not paid very well).
I don't see any evidence in this article that the VP of Sales' intuition about the datasheet was actually correct. So this anecdote isn't all that useful--we're just learning what some suit's best guess is.
This article really made me question the way we are doing things in our startup. Our product is relatively complex and I have written a lot of looong technical explanations for it.
In any event, this article made me wonder whether I am saying too much. I wonder whether all the long explanations I am writing are somehow turning people off, and if we would be better off having a short explanation and asking people to contact us.
In any event, just in case you are wondering, here is our cite:
extremetcp.com
Note this site is only a mockup we made. We have not officially launched yet and are still having a proper web designer and graphic artist design a proper website for us.
1. Your site looks great. It's a technical site, nothing more is really needed. I'd encourage you not to waste your resources on making it look nice. Launch instead. Your audience isn't buying eye candy.
2. Don't just describe your service and technical solutions, show it. Show it graphically, show it with video. Make the data clearer.
3. Don't listen to this marketing mess. It will be technical people who are evaluating your service, provide them with the information that they need to make an informed decision.
4. Talk to your potential clients. Ask them what they need to determine your value, and provide that. Then charge appropriately. If your cost to them exceed your value to them, then you are in the wrong business. If not, be clear and straight forward and you'll do fine.
Thanks, I appreciate the detailed response. Actually I have been thinking how to show an internet TCP connection that goes through several routers with video.
As someone who makes technology purchasing decisions, this article infuriates me. Datasheets and a pricing structure are fundamentally more efficient than sales snowjobs. The fact that this approach is apparently effective makes me weep for the intelligence of other technical decision makers.
To this day, I refuse to do business with companies like rackspace who spam website visitors with marketing materials and chat windows instead of giving me rapid access to network, datacenter, hardware, and pricing data.
The dirty secret is: it isn't effective. It's just that the funnel is the only channel incumbent sales and marketing people allow to exists (hence the bonfire), so for lack of alternatives it just seems effective.
Basically the author is describing how to construct and maintain a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The fact that this whole funnel is completely superfluous for almost anything but bespoke services has been proven by the internet for while now. Anything from online shopping, booking vacations to self-service advertising works just fine without hordes of salespeople.
Thanks "funnel". I hate you.
Sincerely, Every Sysadmin who ever had to buy anything.