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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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