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Comment by aenis | Hacker News Reader

Funny, similar thing happened to me.

IBM along a few other behemots pitched for a serious project at a company I worked for as enterprise arch. All companies brought their top salespeople, and all tried nasty things, but IBM was by far the worst. Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays. He mentioned - and I am not making this up - that he should be talking to people higher in the org. (The most junior person in the room was me, the rest were board-2/-3s). It soon emerged their thing could not work, and I killed it in the first round of pitching. What followed was my bosses' boss, the CIO of a very large company, called me and gave me an earfull since he himself has to explain to CEO why we had the audacity to not choose IBM.

I'd not touch anything IBM ever. Bunch of assholes.

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Yup - I had the same "your guy is a problem, he's anti-innovation." The brilliant thing was that they rang the CEO of the business unit who was at that time +4 on me and had never met me. He was flummoxed and invited me for lunch to find out how I'd made such a big impression! Did me loads of good!

It's because they want to talk to the most power in the decision but with the least information as to how the problem could be solved without the help of Oracle/IBM/whoever.

This, 100%. Think about it another way: IBM et al. sales only lose by talking to lower-title folks.

Best case, they lose control of the narrative as it's reported up internally, and someone higher up still has to approve it.

Worst case, some engineer who actually knows their shit very quickly outlines why this can never work for the given problem.

Once you're into the VP level, there's (usually) less technical knowledge, because folks at that level have full days crammed with higher-level decisions. So it's more plausible for sales to pitch {insert whatever buzzwordy, batshit crazy idea} and have it fly.

To add on, it's also a standard negotiation tactic for a negotiator to try and speak to the highest-ranking person possible. This tactic was specifically recommended by a guest speaker at a Stanford Business School seminar about how to negotiate uploaded to YouTube (timestamped to 31:59 for the relevant bit). [0]

[0] (Seminar from 2007) https://youtu.be/rCmvMDrCWjs?t=1919

Yep. I used to do technical sales support. I would come in after the sales manager had broken the ice and arranged for some of the customer's technical team to listen to our proposed solution. But the sales training we got told us to always sell at the highest level possible, preferably the person who would sign the purchase order, not lower level technical people.

That didn't always work out. We sold a lot of stuff to Hewlett-Packard and they always forced most of the decisions down to the engineers. They would rarely let us talk to the people who could sign the purchase order. The sales people didn't like it much since they didn't have the control that they were used to. But it was kind of great for all of us technical people because we could sit around with the HP engineers and talk about technical stuff without a lot of sales-speak getting in the way.

But wouldn't a competent VP, C-level just shrug and say 'I want technical approval first from my teams, we don't do favorites here, my time is precious and you're making me lose precious amount of it? I had a business unit manager answer that to such queries that way and it felt like good management... Isn't the whole shtick about management to be able to delegate and trust your org?

"Nobody ever got fired for buying an IBM."

I knew a couple of people who got fired after getting their org sucked into WebSphere. Long time ago but it does happen occasionally.

They were fired because of WebSphere?

The quote I mentioned is just a quote, but it points to a part of a reason. If you are a CEO or a high level executive of a big company, going with IBM or Oracle is a safe bet. It's not very likely you will be blamed for failures of IBM or Oracle. It may be a money hole and bad for business but it's a much safer bet than going with some smaller vendor instead of big name vendors.

The "nobody got fired for buying IBM" thing expired decades ago, that mantle passed on to Microsoft. Last 5 - 10 years, nobody gets fired for architecting dozens of microservices in the cloud.

One would think the decision makers would trust the technical advice of the smart people they've hired instead of the opinion of some obviously lying salesman...

Yeah except that a lot of - not all - executives maintain something akin to class solidarity with other executives at big companies, especially their big vendors..

Because at some point they might want/need another job, and so often times it's better to help each other out, at the expense of the folks lower down.

Those folks are useless to them, personally, but that VP at Big Vendor probably isn't.

"If they're smart, why are they working for me?"

Considering that the buzzword shooting, smooth talking sales rep offering an easy to solution to, well, all of the problems is much closer to how most C-Level guys (in established companies at least) think, I'm not surprised anymore. This till manages to chock me from time to time, so.

> Their top guy started their pitch by saying he chatted with our CEO over the christmas holidays.

I had a former Oracle employee use a similar line in an interview for a software engineer position. After repeatedly refusing to answer technical questions then admitting they hadn't written software in over a decade:

"I'm actually good friends with someone high up in Company."

You perfectly demonstrated why they shouldn’t be speaking to you. Their schtick is crafted to work on levels where you don’t get to tank the deal until it’s way too late and egos are now on the line.

"Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was the common phrase at our company in the 1990s. At the time, that was certainly true. Which lead to adoption of truly awful tech, token-ring over type-1 cable, versus ethernet over twisted pair.

I was involved in a small project, and we were running low on the money runway for next phase. The IBM sales guy literally barged into a FORTUNE 50 CIOs office, without an appointment, asking for budget to be approved for the next phase. project continued, but I never saw the sales guy again. The team had a good chuckle and I never understood what the guy was thinking he would achieve with this tactic.

IMHO that is like kids and lying. More often than not, the right answer to the question "Why are you doing this, when we always catch you?" is "Because it works more often than you catching me lying and also because you don't even get that".

Stories like this about IBM were handed down to me by my father. They've been doing this a long time!

My first instinct is that this would be a short term strategy that trades off the company’s good name for marginal sales, but I guess not!

There's a sucker born every minute.

It sure sounds like IBM were bad. But it sounds like your company was even worse, the way your bosses' boss behaved.

Well, no. In the end they backed my reco and we didnt go IBM. I feel like I did inconvenience my managers though, and indeed left not long afterwards for a better job.

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