There's No Free Lunch (That You'd Want to Eat)

Viewpoint: Jerry Gregoire, former CIO, Dell

Advice is a dangerous gift. Give some and the best you can hope for is the other guy's natural tendency to ignore it. The next best thing you can hope for is that he never finds out you were motivated by anything but good intentions. That's a lotta' hopin'.

So, with that, here's a little advice.

You should never agree to endorse or demonstrate a vendor's product in exchange for anything - anything. Furthermore, you should never accept the endorsement of another CIO who has.

The reasons are simple: You don't have to, and you shouldn't want to.

Before I explain, it's worth observing that, in spite of the presenters' best efforts, all of the sales presentations you'll ever have to sit through are pretty much the same. There's the "Here's why you should buy" portion followed by the "Here's why you should buy now" part. At the heart of the "buy now" argument is the depressingly accurate notion that mutual interest is a more important catalyst to agreement than logic. What these pitches, of which there are basically three, share is that they are all reasonable, logical and completely bogus. I gave each of these offers a name some years back. See if you recognize any of them.

First, and certainly the silliest, is the one called Send a Boy to Camp, where the vendor offers substantial discounts, services or whatever if you agree to sign a contract before some magical and imminent date, usually at its quarter or fiscal year-end. On a stack of Bibles, I swear we've had salespeople who confided that if they closed the sale quickly, they would win a trip to Las Vegas or somewhere else equally exotic. Breathtaking.

The second, called There Goes the Neighbourhood, is where the vendor in question reveals to you that all of your competitors have either purchased or are about to purchase its product. Now, to most really good IT departments this would seem like a compelling reason not to buy and a golden opportunity to create some differentiation, but by definition half of the IT departments out there are below average (present readership excluded, of course).

And the third pitch, called Tin Men, is the most transparent, potentially most dangerous offer and, worse, the one that requires you give up something in addition to your money. The Tin Men pitch got its name from the Barry Levinson movie of the same title. In it, there's a scene where a couple of salesmen are taking photographs of a house. The woman of the house comes out to ask what they're doing. "Taking before and after pictures for Life magazine," they tell her. She's very excited until she learns her house is to be the before photo and a neighbour's house is to be the after. Of course, if she's willing to have her house aluminium-sided (for only the cost of labour and materials), then her home could be used for the after picture. Get it?

The high-tech version of this scam is, of course, taking software, hardware or services at a "discount" in return for offering yourself as a reference and your company as the neighbourhood showplace. Which, finally, brings us back to why this is a bad idea.