Bad Seed Sales Reps

It is fashionable in the current IT spending slump for desperate, commission-crazed vendor sales reps to attempt to force-fit a 100 percent single-vendor solution from top to bottom in each and every engagement. Even worse, many of these sales reps are attempting to push as much product into an account as possible rather than trying to maximize the customer's current IT infrastructure.

Vendors can deny it all they want, but some are also deauthorizing or subtly steering business away from any solution provider that does not march in lockstep with the vendor sales rep 24x7. At the bottom of this despicable behavior is a complete lack of consideration for customers and their business needs. And layered on top of these tactics, in some cases, are short-sighted, channel strategies by some vendors to engage only with a few named partners who are 100 percent committed to that vendor lock, stock and barrel.

In this week's cover story by CRN Infrastructure Editor Larry Hooper, Cisco CEO John Chambers, one of the top executives in this business, gives his no-nonsense assessment of unsavory sales-rep practices. "If the salesperson is focused too much on the short term, then they may have a long-term problem here at Cisco," he said.

Short-sighted vendor sales reps are slicing their companies' throats by committing what is essentially an unnatural act, especially considering that 99.99 percent of all customers have multivendor, heterogenous computing environments. The days of single-vendor, minicomputer office-automation installations are gone forever. Customers are more technology- and business-savvy than ever. The return-on-investment focus driving each and every technology buying decision favors independent, multivendor solution providers. Look at the numbers. Customers do not want to rely on a single vendor. They want an impartial advocate helping them drive their business, not a narrow-minded, product-sales-driven manufacturer.

Customers aren't stupid. Companies with CEOs and vendor channel chiefs that do not get their sales reps to partner rather than play the devil's surrogate are going to lose one account after another.Vendors that let sales representatives run amok and strong-arm solution providers are in for a rude awakening in the form of a big fat decline in market share.

It is fashionable in the current IT spending slump for desperate, commission-crazed vendor sales reps to attempt to force-fit a 100 percent single-vendor solution from top to bottom in each and every engagement. Even worse, many of these sales reps are attempting to push as much product into an account as possible rather than trying to maximize the customer's current IT infrastructure.

Vendors can deny it all they want, but some are also deauthorizing or subtly steering business away from any solution provider that does not march in lockstep with the vendor sales rep 24x7. At the bottom of this despicable behavior is a complete lack of consideration for customers and their business needs. And layered on top of these tactics, in some cases, are short-sighted, channel strategies by some vendors to engage only with a few named partners who are 100 percent committed to that vendor lock, stock and barrel.

In this week's cover story by CRN Infrastructure Editor Larry Hooper, Cisco CEO John Chambers, one of the top executives in this business, gives his no-nonsense assessment of unsavory sales-rep practices. "If the salesperson is focused too much on the short term, then they may have a long-term problem here at Cisco," he said.

Short-sighted vendor sales reps are slicing their companies' throats by committing what is essentially an unnatural act, especially considering that 99.99 percent of all customers have multivendor, heterogenous computing environments. The days of single-vendor, minicomputer office-automation installations are gone forever. Customers are more technology- and business-savvy than ever. The return-on-investment focus driving each and every technology buying decision favors independent, multivendor solution providers. Look at the numbers. Customers do not want to rely on a single vendor. They want an impartial advocate helping them drive their business, not a narrow-minded, product-sales-driven manufacturer.

Customers aren't stupid. Companies with CEOs and vendor channel chiefs that do not get their sales reps to partner rather than play the devil's surrogate are going to lose one account after another.