Big Companies...
I know I've ranted about this before (Max Clark: Receptionists), and I will probably rant about it again, but here it goes...
Companies exist to sell things. When you want to buy a product or service what do you naturally do? You call the company and say something like, "Hi, I would like to buy product x from you". Why do some companies make this so difficult to do?
I have spent the past week calling all of the major hardware manufacturers (HP, IBM, SGI, SUN, Hitachi, Fujistu, EMC, NetApp, etc...) for a SAN project that I am working on. This is a big project... several hundred TeraBytes of data. Not only would it be a huge dollar amount for whichever vendor is selected, it will also be a major advertising tag line for the year(s) to come. You would think every one of them would jump all over this opportunity right? They all do, as soon as you can talk to a person.
Every single phone call is marked with a negotiation on my part to talk with a account representative for my area. It took me over an hour to convince the person on the phone that even though my company had less than 20 employees we really did need to speak to a person for a multi-million dollar project. With IBM I have resorted to randomly dialing extensions hoping that I will get lucky and find the right person.
How do you grow a company past the point where you have divisions and structures and policies and procedures without losing sight of this basic fact, if your customer can't talk to you, they won't be your customer?
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