Long time ago, when I was pursuing my masters, as a part of the course I had a to complete a three month internship. I got selected into an organization which was into Networking and Server sales. The three months I spent there were pathetic. I almost forgot those days.
However, I have recently saw a Hindi movie, which depicted the true picture about sales. After watching this I remembered my old experiences.
During the internship, for the first few days I was asked to collect existing Customer feedback on the sales done with them. One day I ended up at an Agricultural Research University in Hyderabad. I met a professor who was in-charge of a Digital Library project. I met her and asked for feeback. She almost started crying. The story unfolded so ...
Our sales guy approached her long back and started explaining her about SUN's initiative in digital library solutions. He recommended her a server which was priced at Rs.5 Lakhs or half a million in Indian currency. She, I assume asked him if it would work with any custom software and he said yes. The Prof. blindly bought it. In the other part of the story, which happened before, someone else approached her regarding a software solutions to Digital Libraries. She gave the contract to them to write a software for the university.
Now on the D-Day they had both the software and the server. They kept the software CD in the CD-ROM of the SUN server and expected something to happen. Oops!!!!! nothing happened because the software was written in .NET. The university realized this and called the software vendor and requested to rewrite it in Java. The guy accepted it for another 2Lakhs, which the university did not have.
So the day I went there I learnt that because of all this fiasco, the Prof got demoted, the solution came to a halt and they have a software and hardware which do not work together. The prof boots up the server and checks yahoo mail once in a week.
After this she tried calling my sales guys many a times, in vain.
This is how sales are ... People are duped 1000% of the times in software. That is the reason why software is selling.
There would be a time when people would certainly get intelligent and then I wonder what these IT sales guys do?
If you want to know the name of the horrible company I worked for ...
