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by itronitron
1034 days ago
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I was talking with a colleague once about this and they mentioned that as long as everyone being pitched was wearing a suit then they wouldn't worry about the wild claims the sales people made about our software. But if there was an engineer in the room they'd feel obligated to nudge everyone back to reality. |
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I've lost count of the times I've had sales people outright lie to me about how audience data or targeting signals work, particularly about the nuances of privacy aspects which I care a great deal about and have done a lot of work with.
These days if I'm serious about something I ensure there's a competent engineer (even a sales engineer) and product person on the call and largely ignore the sales person. I'm even really upfront about it by saying something like "I'm the decision maker, I have very specific technical and product questions and I want to avoid wasting time for either party by moving quickly or getting to a quick 'no', please confirm you can have XYZ people on our first call."
Usually it's been great that way. If they try to jerk me around with those people being unavailable at the last minute, I tell them I'm rescheduling until they can get their calendars in order.
This all comes with a responsibility though to make sure I'm not wasting their people's time. So I make sure I've done my homework and have likely sent an agenda/list of questions in advance to discuss. Depending on the relative sizes of my and their company, this can also be an express path to getting executive leadership who can cut through the noise of the process and get some good terms for me.