What Sales Professionals Don’t Want You to Know
October 15, 2008
eCommerce Times’s “The 5 Things Your ERP Sales Rep Doesn’t Want You to Know” contains information I found useful. You can read the October 13, 2008, feature here. The five tips apply to enterprise search, information access, and content processing functions like the gravely defective content management systems many organizations license. I don’t want to recycle the five points. I would like to call attention to two and urge you to check out the other three in the original article.
For me, the two home runs in the article were:
- Integration is complex and expensive
- A vendor’s integration strategy might follow its own drum beat, not the licensee’s.
What I found interesting is that integration, not technology, haunts ERP and, in my opinion, information access. Let’s think about why:
First, most professionals hear XML and think that content conversion problems are no longer an issue. Wrong. XML is not a panacea. Plus, other types of data and information must be converted and transformed and moved into the enterprise system. Forget these steps and your budget is blown to bits and the project will be delayed by weeks, maybe months.
Second, vendors do what vendors want to do, not what the customer assumes the vendor will do. One example will characterize this problem. The vendor knows a problem exists in a sub system. The vendor has the engineering resources to address that problem. The customers who want connectors are out of luck. The vendor has to address the sub system problem. Then maybe the vendor will address the connector issue. Meanwhile the customer can’t transform some content. Engineering priorities and resources, not just money, are going to keep the vendor doing what the vendor must do, not what the customer assumes the vendor will do. Will the sales professional explain reality to the customer? Sure, obliquely.
Do you know other “facts” or “realities” a sales professional does not want a customer to know? Please, share them.
Stephen Arnold, October 14, 2008
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