I feel like a lot of these articles are popping up lately, this one just brought me to the point of expressing my frustration with the whole notion of trying to squeeze another 10% out of our customer base. Apologies for the borderline non sequitur.
>We're talking about enterprise sales in the logistics and transportation industry here. I doubt the final decision whether or not to buy this particular freight rate benchmarking tool is being done on an impulse. There are whole teams responsible for enterprise purchases who have already ripped apart this offer and know every common sales trick in the book.
Within the software industry this is a cliche. Someone who hasn't touched code in 15-infinity years makes a buy order for a demonstrably inferior product, and we waste $500k in labor and overhead costs so that he doesn't look bad for making a $200k order for solutions nobody wanted. Whether they intend to or not, tools like these are going to pick up on patterns of weak judgement and exploit them. Really the same problem with A/B testing.
> Also, I can't help but smirk at the thought of mentioning Disney a couple sentences after talking about an "escalating arms race of advertising tools and trickery". Perhaps the phone should have pinged before you made that promise too.
Haha. Touche. It was the first thing that popped into my head when trying to think of a common social obligation that is difficult to fulfill if you can't manage your finances.