God Love ‘Em, Some People Really Are Stupid

In my years of sales experience and supervised release, there are only two deals, only two, that are burned into my cerebral cortex and awaken feelings of anger and frustration whenever I am forced to recall them.

The first we’ll save for a later date.

The second…..arrrrgggghhhhh!  Sorry, had to vent.

When I was selling Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solutions, our inside team uncovered an opportunity at a company with whom I used to do business in a former career.  Having left our relationship on good terms after a productive career, I was eager to go visit and see some old friends.

After seeing the state of their web presence, this company needed an ECM like my cousins need a good bail bondsman.  They had over 10 sites, in 3 languages, that were stale, inconsistent, with no logical flow among and within the sites.

I am a big believer in “bird in the hand” so I stayed calm and conservative when forecasting our probablity of winning,  however, in the back of my mind, I knew this deal looked good. 

To improve our chances, I threw out my super, double secret, only good for the next 30 seconds, discount.

I sent our proposal and then waited.

The next day I received a call from the Project Manager, they had a counter offer.

 It seems that a few years previous they had acquired another ECM solution and they wanted me to match the terms of their former vendor….free.

Yep.  Free.

Their current vendor needed a brand name on the customer list to establish credability so they gave the software for free in exchange for some marketing press.

If you are a small company and thinking about using this tactic, unless the prospect is Jesus, don’t do it.  It never pays off like you think.

In the case of my former prospect, because it was “free”  they never paid enough attention or respect to the software.  They did not allocate budget for training, they never assigned a team to get the thing installed, and they never upgraded, because in their eyes, since it was “free” they should not have to invest anything in it…ever.

Evidently this vendor pulled this tactic multiple times, because they went bankrupt and were liquated.

So the counter offer to me was for me to match the same deal as the bankrupt vendor.

As politely as I could, I restated for clarification “You want me to match the same pricing structure as your last vendor of whom you complained about lack of training, support, and the dismal failure of thier solution.  Who, based on these types of business practices, went bankrupt?”

“Yes.  That was the only way we could get this project approved by management.” came the reply.

 ”We’ll withdraw from the project and we wish you the best”.

The motivation for this post came from my good friend DJ sent me this link.

Good Luck.

Sasser