Salesmen

[AlexPilot]

Im sure everyone has a similar experiance around april onwards of salesmen phoning up and asking if there is anything they can quote you for and telling you about themselfs and how many years they have been supplying to education. And most of the time you usually have to say to them that you all covered and that theres no plans for any equipment to be purchased.

This year however was different in that I actually do have plans for equipment to get including interactive whiteboards, promethean accessories, replace entire staff's laptops, some new desktops and abit more. So most phone calls I went down the list of equipment and they would go "okay the quote will be with you by this afternoon". And usually after you recive the quote you have no more correspondance with each other.

Some salesmen that are actually pretty good and who work for a company you can respect you get a good relationship with. Stone for example the sales rep im dealing with has gone out of his way for me in that I wanted to have a trial of the promethean ActiVote sets and ActiSlates. He said he would contact promethean and see what can be done, and I got a phone call today from him telling me that they are being sent to me for next week and they are going to pick them up afterwards. He also has sent me a trial for two weeks of one their high end desktops as we have never bought from stone before.

RM also surprised me in that I cheekily asked to borrow an Asus EEE PC for a week giving the reason that it would be difficult to explain to SMT and govenors how usefully they would be without giving it to a teacher (in this case an SEN LSA) to let them experiance and get behind it and also push for it. The lady at RM said that the stock they have is so limited that they wouldnt be able to let me have one for a while, however she would ask the regional rep if I could borrow his for a while. and today he came to drop it off go through a few things and I spent about 2 hours talking to him.

So really simply because of the experiance I have had with two salesmen I choosen to go with stone and RM instead of simply the guys who phone and quote (and them email me two days later asking if im going to go ahead). Altho the guy from RM did comment about my lack of CC4 on my network.

[FN-GM]

Yep we had loads of phone calls. We had one from Securus, I couldn’t get a word in and after 10 mins of the salesman telling me about it my reply was “yes, I know we have it”. I would I thought they would check first.

I do like it when they go out of your way to help, lets face it allot don’t or they badger you all the time.

[Diello]

LMAO, we get exactly the same calls from Securus!

[alan-d]

I have a large list of suppliers I contact early in the year to get quotes and order from. If it's an on-speck call from a sales rep I either give a wrong email addy or if they sound promising the correct address and have a look a what they offer. If I don't like them they go into the junk filter and the receptionist adds them to the blacklist

[torledo]

i had just such an email from a supplier i'd never heard of asking about any kit they could quote for us.......normally i wouldn't reply but this time i responded because i wanted a price for something and the usual suppliers were taking their time. They also got my interest becuase they were a dell supplier and previously we'd only ever bought directly from dell education and getting a quote from dell is like waiting for a bus on christmas day.

so in that particular case i've got a supplier who could well save us a lot of hassle in the future, so long as they are competitive on price.

other times i've had calls from suppliers and they don't offer anything we don't already get from existing suppliers. I still normally give them a correct email as you never know when you might need them.

[maniac]

If I had £1 for every marketing call we get, I'd be a very rich man. I hate companies that cold call, it irritates me. If I'm looking for something specific, then I'll go looking for companies that can supply what I need, if their advertising is any good then I should find them anyway!

[Sylv3r]

The receptionists receive more phone calls for me then any other person in the school! She does a good job of weeding them out before it gets to me. I'm tempted to get a direct line put in so that any supplier I use can get straight through to me and the others ringing the school direct will get the cold shoulder.

[teejay]

Yes, box of choccys to the reception staff and a blacklist works for me

Worst one I had was at home, we'd just had all our windows and doors replaced by a double glazing company. Two weeks later, sat watching the F1 qualifying, three phone calls during the actual qualifying from the same company who had just installed the windows asking if we needed any double glazing

Following day, watching the F1 race, 5 phone calls from said company again trying to sell me double glazing. I feel sorry for the 5th person, they got a stream of obsenities shouted down the phone at them. I wouldn't have minded quite so much if they had called during all the advert breaks.

[torledo]

Yes, box of choccys to the reception staff and a blacklist works for me

Worst one I had was at home, we'd just had all our windows and doors replaced by a double glazing company. Two weeks later, sat watching the F1 qualifying, three phone calls during the actual qualifying from the same company who had just installed the windows asking if we needed any double glazing

Following day, watching the F1 race, 5 phone calls from said company again trying to sell me double glazing. I feel sorry for the 5th person, they got a stream of obsenities shouted down the phone at them. I wouldn't have minded quite so much if they had called during all the advert breaks.

have you seen the dom joly programme with the guy mr. angry...his responses to cold callers is classic....in one he pretended to have short-term memory loss so he kept asking the same questions, "sorry what are you trying to sell again" etc,

in the end the sales chimps get so exasperated they put the phone down on him LOL.

[teejay]

Yes, I think its called The Complainers or something similar. Best one was when they turned up at the head office of Capital One and emptied sackloads of their junk mail all over the floor.
Best thing with junk mail, if it has a reply paid envelope is to write 'no thanks' across the junk mail, stick it in the reply envelope and send it back to them. Costs them money and waists their time opening it.

[Pyroman]

Yes, I think its called The Complainers or something similar. Best one was when they turned up at the head office of Capital One and emptied sackloads of their junk mail all over the floor.
Best thing with junk mail, if it has a reply paid envelope is to write 'no thanks' across the junk mail, stick it in the reply envelope and send it back to them. Costs them money and waists their time opening it.

Amount of times i've wanted to send bricks through the post in pre-paid envelopes must be in the hundreds. Like you say they have to pay for the postage so everyone get your old yellow pages out and start posting!

[tom_newton]

On a serious note - good to see Stone are getting lowing reports - one of the reasons we have a partnership with them to deliver SmoothWall products - so if any of you are Stone customers and are thinking of getting some better filtering you don't have to add another supplier, and Stone can support both h/w and s/w.

On a lighter note.... i hope that this is the wav I was looking for (sorry, no soundcard in work desktop) http://wired.st-and.ac.uk/~chris/hum...und/btcall.wav

Edit: warning, if this is the wav I was looking for... contains strong language

[itman]

We get so annoyed with these sales guys! Don't take a hint, if we wanted something we would go and get in!

[MK-2]

i just tell them we are part of bsf and have no control over our budget.
that gets rid of em quickly

[Elky]

There was a similar thread to this around April last year and I tried to get the 'evil salesmans' point of view across. This is what I posted last year anyway for what its worth....

Interesting comments here guys. You people really do hate sales people don't you, haha. As much as you might hate them though, most are just people trying to earn a living as much as the next person! We appreciate how annoyed you must get, how busy you are etc and we really don't go out of our way to upset you.

We don't really use cold calling here much. We email people on our list once a week and send out brochures 3-4 times a year. We are working on one at the moment that will be going out to everyone in May.

Believe it or not, we have a very good customer base and have very good relationships with most of our customers. We can have a good chat, a laugh etc without the customer wanting something nasty to happen to us! It takes time to build up this relationship but obviously we need to make contact in the first place to start the ball rolling.

Imagine how difficult this is. Threads in the past have discussed marketing ways. Heres a few examples..

1. Sending out a brochure.
This is very costly and the timing and pricing has to be spot on. Most of you say you chuck them straight in the bin.

2. Cold calling.
No salesperson likes cold calling but most have to do it as part of their day and they have targets to meet. Cold callers get treated as if they are evil

3. Email offers.
This is the most cost effective way of keeping customers and potential customer up to date with pricing. Probably the best way to market our products and one that a lot of you seem to prefer. Problem is, how do we get you to subscribe to this in the first place? Cold calling? Brochures?

Unless you are a DELL or an RM etc then you just don't have the huge marketing funds and resources available. For relatively small to medium companies like ourselves, competing against these companies marketing wise just isnt going to happen so we just have to plod along with the above means. Obviously this means upsetting a few people but thats the way it is. We don't want to upset people, we just want to earn a living like the rest of you.

The thing we can offer though is superb customer care. We have managed to keep every customer of ours who have bought PCs and this is because of the excellent build quality, good pricing and as I mentioned, excellent customer care. We have about 12 staff here and the facility to build around 1000 PCs per month. If a customer has a problem, they ring their account manager or assigned technical support person. All problems are resolved quickly and efficiently. We aren't too big, problems don't get lost in the system or forgotten about, they are dealt with immediately

Basically, when we get a new customer, we keep them. Its getting the new customers that is the hard part and the only to do this is by using the above options. Some people prefer someone to call them , some people prefer to be emailed, some people prefer to look through a brochure. Unless we know who prefers what, we'll just have to continue guessing.

Regards

The Salesman

That was then and most of it is still the same except for the fact we no longer send out a brochure 3-4 times a year. We now do this once a year due to the huge costs involved. However, we are now also getting a lot of new business from word of mouth, recommendations and through sponsoring EduGeek so thats a good thing. And of course, we have also kept all existing customers happy along the way

I just wanted to get my point across anyway

Regards