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7 Ways Technology Vendors Blow the Sales Pitch

IT leaders share the mistakes salespeople make when trying to get their business
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The relationship between IT execs and vendors has always been fraught with conflict. Each party's divergent interests and motivations make it hard to find common ground. Despite the effort IT vendors and buyers put into patching their seemingly irreconcilable differences, the relationship still doesn't always work out. Sometimes, it's the little things vendors do - the things they're least aware of, such as bickering with their own tech support people during pitches - that make IT leaders lose confidence. Here's a list of common mistakes vendors make when pitching to CIOs.

1.They're arrogant.

A vendor's haughty attitude is the biggest turnoff for Charlene Barnes, the executive VP and CIO of mid-market wealth management firm JBHanauer & Company. She once worked with a telecom provider that thought so highly of itself it couldn't fathom any reason why a customer would not want to do business with it. Particularly troubling was the company's "our way or the highway; we don't need your business" attitude.

Barnes didn't put up with that shtick for long, and she ended her company's relationship with the telecom. "I don't care what kind of monopoly there is in the market, you [as a buyer] have a choice," she says.

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More about: Billion, Exposure, HIS Limited, Leader, Leader Computers, Oracle, Stratify, XOMA

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