Bonfire of the Vanities

As someone with both technical knowledge and purchasing power, I've run into this frustration as well.

It's always pretty easy though to say "we like your product, but we want more information as to integration possibilities. Can you put us in touch with someone on your technical staff so we can ask these questions?"

Everyone company I've run into will at least give you an email contact, and all of the smaller ones (less than 20 persons employed) will just transfer you to the tech department directly.

I've done this with everything from hardware purchases to $7000/per cpu database software.

This is why most companies need a 'talk to an engineer' instead of a sales person for those who want the details. From my understanding a few soft/hard tech companies do this with engineer rotations as you could learn a lot from talking to perspective customers (who knew!).

The 'funnel' is not the problem, it's the blindness that is. With sufficient information, chose the right competing funnels, and let sales carry you the rest of the way. With insufficient information, it's more like a 'meat grinder' than a funnel.

So don't hate the funnel, hate the bad marketing material that has no technical relevance to your concerns, and the clueless sales force that does its clients a disservice every time they answer a question or make a technical promise.

Wrong lesson. The story was telling you something about how b2b sales work.

EDIT: Also, since every sales force everywhere runs on commission, it's impossible for them to be overpaid unless they don't sell anything (in which case they're not paid very well).

Wrong. If you read carefully, it said (and I believe it's true) that the datasheet will not sell the product. Also true, it will actually be more likely to lose customers because some detail doesn't match the customer's goals.

For products above $100K, having a sales person who can actually listen to what the customer wants, and tailor their pitch appropriately, is worth millions. No "useless, overpaid sales staff".

Of course, your mileage varies greatly in sales :-)

"A couple years later, the entire market segment died, because their crappy products couldn't compete with personal computers".

This is wrong in several ways:

A few years later, Convergent was bought by Unisys for $350 million (in 1988 dollars). http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/11/business/company-news-unis...

The MegaFrame wasn't competing with personal computers, it was competing with engineering workstations (Sun, Apollo, etc.) and departmental minicomputers (HP, DG, others I don't recall at the moment).

Convergent's personal computer products were arguably less crappy than IBM's (they often were a generation ahead in CPUs (80186 vs 8088, then 386 vs 286, etc.), they ran a multitasking message-passing OS instead of DOS, etc.). For a while, they sold quite well in some markets (e.g. every U-Haul office in the country had a B-25 on every desk at one point in the early 90s). They lost anyway, because cheap crappy PC clones were so ubiquitous, and the resulting software and hardware ecosystem could out-evolve any specialized product from a single company.

The market segment was still alive and well as of 2000, bigger than ever, and technically you can still buy SPARCs and POWER workstations.

A/B test. Use actual evidence, instead of guessing like the VP in this article.

1. Your site looks great. It's a technical site, nothing more is really needed. I'd encourage you not to waste your resources on making it look nice. Launch instead. Your audience isn't buying eye candy. 2. Don't just describe your service and technical solutions, show it. Show it graphically, show it with video. Make the data clearer. 3. Don't listen to this marketing mess. It will be technical people who are evaluating your service, provide them with the information that they need to make an informed decision. 4. Talk to your potential clients. Ask them what they need to determine your value, and provide that. Then charge appropriately. If your cost to them exceed your value to them, then you are in the wrong business. If not, be clear and straight forward and you'll do fine.

The dirty secret is: it isn't effective. It's just that the funnel is the only channel incumbent sales and marketing people allow to exists (hence the bonfire), so for lack of alternatives it just seems effective.

Basically the author is describing how to construct and maintain a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The fact that this whole funnel is completely superfluous for almost anything but bespoke services has been proven by the internet for while now. Anything from online shopping, booking vacations to self-service advertising works just fine without hordes of salespeople.