

A Cautionary Tale for (Startup) Sales People - anonymousITPeon

I work for a very large company (65K+ employees, thousands of developers). Our IT department has a $1 Billion+ per year budget). The industry is financial/insurance, so we have a lot of red-tape when it comes to purchasing things.<p>I recently wanted to get some development software from a company that we have never purchased from before. The first step in the process is to get a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in place, followed by a review of their EULA.<p>After our purchasing area sent the NDA to the software company, one of the salespeople wrote back and told us that they didn't want to use our NDA, they aren't going to modify theirs and that we should go through one of their resellers that we already had an NDA in place with. Fine.<p>Then purchasing starts to take a look at the EULA. It has some terms that are never going to pass muster with our legal department; for example: they can use our name in advertising. No one is allowed to use our name for advertising. Not IBM, not Oracle, not Microsoft, no one (all three of those companies signed our NDA). So our purchasing department decided that they don't want to deal with them to get the EULA changed since they wouldn't even work with us on a simple NDA.<p>We are going to purchase a competitor’s product - there is no open source equivalent.<p>Why does this matter? Once everything was in place, it would have been really easy for someone else in my company to purchase more software from them. And we spend a lot on software.<p>Just because someone at this little company didn't want to take the time to research who they were dealing with and gave some attitude to a purchasing department, they will likely never have a chance here again.<p>If you're a startup, you might want to do some research about a company that comes knocking at your door and seems to be a bit of a pain in the ass. If they have a $1 Billion dollar IT budget (or even a little less than that), it might be worth it.
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adis1_ch
Sales people have it tough in a startup environment. They can't go around
acting cool, wearing shorts and slippers. Cause they are business and need to
act like that. In a startup they need to act different especially with
clients. If the client is interested in working with a startup, that's a big
leap of faith they are taking. So the sales dep. need to adjust and
accommodate the clients deamands and concern.

