For the record, my Cisco saleperson and pre-sales engineer have always been supportive of my efforts to run a multi-vendor network and never has laid any of this "it's a priveledge to work with Cisco" crap on me. They don't do a hard sell to get my business, but that's OK since I prefer to talk to salespeople only when I need something from them... They don't hesitate to say they're better than everybody else, but they do continue to work for me instead of the other way around. (What salesperson doesn't claim to work for the company that's better than everyone else?) Having said that, there are certainly some salespeople with Cisco that are, to be polite, overzealous in their dealings with customers. These types of salespeople (whatever company they sell for) should be chased away immediately. It seems that most people that I've talked to that have had this experience with Cisco have been from Europe (not to say it doesn't happen in the US), so I wonder if for one reason or another the Cisco European salesforce tends to work that way. It's too bad for Cisco, because if they'd had used this tactic on me, I would have certainly shown them the door... --zawada At 06:30 AM 10/16/96 +0100, Peter Galbavy wrote:
The salespeople in the UK are using that tactic too? If a sales rep EVER walked into my office and fed me a line like that, I would end the meeting right there. As it is, I refuse to do business with Cisco not because of their products, but because of their marketing department and their corporate attitude of "We're the best, nobody can touch us, and if you want to buy our product you better bend over backwards to do what we want you to do." That was their attitude three years ago when our company was just getting started, and I haven't noticed it change much today.
No. I think the phrase *actually* used at a meeting (I was elsewhere that day) was "It is a priveledge to deal with a market leader like Cisco." This was the Cisco sales rep, not us. sigh.
Buy! Buy! Bye Bye. :-P
Regards, -- Peter Galbavy peter@wonderland.org @ Home phone://44/973/499465 in Wonderland http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/ snail://UK/NW1_6LE/London/21_Harewood_Avenue/
Paul J. Zawada, RCDD | Senior Network Engineer zawada@ncsa.uiuc.edu | National Center for Supercomputing Applications +1 217 244 4728 | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada