WTF is up with Dell?
markmaunder.com
markmaunder.com
It's marketing. They don't understand that you don't give two shits how much smiling is going on in your email. The marketeers are used to doing mass marketing to people who want $300 workstations for their houses, not people interested in buying some server hardware that they'll hopefully never see after it goes into the rack.
They don't get that no matter how many smiling guys in suits they put in your email, it isn't going to change the hardware your asking about. These people seriously believe that if they show you crappy hardware with a smiling silk-tie-guy, you'll be happy to buy it because the silk-tie-guy gives you a good feeling when you see it, and you associate that good feeling with the crappy hardware.
Sorry, ranting; we just got a new batch of marketing drones at my job who want to spam the living-hell out of our customers with this sort of garbage. I've been arguing with them back and forth about it for the last few days and I'm not making any progress.
Sadly, I bet it would be the one with the guy.
I forget the actual numbers in the study but my recollection was that the number of people who read an e-mail with a picture of a smiling person on it was significantly higher. They attributed this to a couple factors...
1. When you differentiate people tend to pause. So someone going through 20 e-mails of all text will pause on the one with a picture for no other reason than it's different.
2. People tend to reflect emotion from other people and a picture can trigger that to a lesser extent. This is a well established psychological tendency that people have. Imagine yourself walking up to a group of your friends who are all laughing at something. Even without knowing what they are laughing at you'll instinctively start to smile. Same concept.
Hence the theory that people are more likely to read an e-mail with a smiling person's picture.
So when every other marketing email has a picture of a recently-laid soul patch guy, it will make sense to send plain text again?
"No matter how sophisticated your tastes or your decision buying process are, there's a marketing profile targeting you".
Don't ever under-estimate the marketing people just because you see them trying to sell beer with girls in bikinis (or server hardware with smiling guys in suits). When it's working best, you don't realize anything is going on at all.
My advice to Dell. Don't sack the marketing guys, get better operations people.
On average, they are not.
This is half the reason I build my own servers. It's impossible to decide what tradeoffs to make when the true cost of those tradeoffs is hidden behind some sales asshole.
No matter; I usually pay less than half buying parts (which are usually sold in a rational manner) and assembling myself.
But then again, the salesguy might be there to ensure future business. The next time you need a server, are you going to pick on the phone and give Mick a call, or are you going to waste your (presumably) valuable time doing some comparison shopping?
Maybe it's worth it to give the through-salespeople orders a discount because there's a person to person relationship built that encourages future sales.
In fact, I'm working on this subsystem right now. For large catalogs and large numbers of customers, this becomes quite challenging. There's a huge volume of data, and keep it current while product pricing, availability, licensing terms, etc. change, is tough.
My preferred vendor is Silicon Mechanics: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/
They sell SuperMicro equipment, they list prices, estimated power draw, etc, all up-front. You can add machines to your shopping cart, checkout, and you're done.
They've always provided us with fantastic customer service, and stepped up to replace/repair anything that didn't work right, even if the cause wasn't entirely clear (such as a hard drive issue that could have been OS related, but turned out to be a Seagate firmware issue).
I know, which is why I said exactly that in my post =)
That said, I prefer vendors that simply charge everyone the same reasonable price, rather than having such a large profit margin that they can afford to:
1) Pay a sales team to finagle over quotes.
2) Slash their prices on demand.
Obviously, things are a bit different when you're buying in truly massive quantities.
Then Dell gave us a sales manager and all sales had to go through him - to be fair he would often return our calls within a week or t least send an email saying he would call. And quotes through him were generally only 10-20% more than the website price once you had removed all the Server CALS and Office licenses that got added to every machine you asked for.
But of course he wouldn't sell you Latitude or whatever they were calling their low end machines because you were now a medium size customer. In the end we resorted to buying anything for the dev team from the outlet on credit card.
We needed to purchase some blades a year or so ago, and they initially quoted us 45k (which seemed to be well under their website's price). Since we were comparison shopping, we let them know IBM's quote, and after some intense back and forth we got the price down to around 37k (and with some ADDITIONAL components not in the original quote)... a significant savings.
Along those same lines, if we need a new laptop or desktop, the refurbs are usually well-priced, but if speed is important we just shoot them a list of specs and get a quote quickly (instead of spending time on the website comparing optiplexes vs. latitudes, or whatever the different models are.)
Most businesses don't feel the same way - they like sales guys, because the orders are larger - and it gives them the feeling that they are getting a special, one-off customized offer. No matter what the listed discounts are on the website, they'll always feel like a custom quote is a better deal (because it's part of the salesman's job to give them that feeling).
AFAIK Dell does offer automated quotes (I found these http://www.dell.com/us/en/business/servers/rack_optimized/ct... for example) - and even he says "I even put the $4000 server that I want to buy in my shopping cart".
So what I think he means he gets the automated quote, but since it's not the 'special offer' he's used to getting directly from the sales guy, he's unhappy.
So it seems that the blog author loves the hardware - but not enough to purchase it at the price listed on the website.
My question in general is, how good are the discounts you get from these a sales guys, typically?
And my question to the blog author is: How much of a discount are you losing now, that you'll compromise on the hardware you wanted.
The reason is that if you use a sales guy, you're considered a "client", and they can get a good idea of your total profitability based on a collective snapshot of everything you buy. If you use the web, they don't.
I used to think this way until I started running a business and realized that people are people and they do things like give discounts, while web apps do not.
When we order with a web app we generally follow up with a call to a sales rep to see if we can get a discount (now, or in the future).
You should look into talking to people sometimes.
I remember studying one of those. Can't remember the company off the top of my head, some retail electronics outfit. They sacked all their senior sales people on the floor to save money and ended up going out of business because people could find anybody to help them adequately when they were in the store with money.
During those transfers they asked if I was charging them to my companies account. I couldn't believe how easily they were going to allow me to charge a personal purchase to the place they were going to be delivered.
Eventually I found out that their web interface allowed you to split a purchase over a few credit cards. Few years later they are still running with zero problems. Get them with DRAC, its great.
Bottom line is, if you are buying from Dell, either you are a "Dude, I'm getting dell guy", or a company with an account. If you are just buying a few rackmount servers, dont fit a profile and can get serious hassles.
Needless to say, we went elsewhere.
Since then I've decided that the two pennies (or otherwise insignificant amount) I save building myself is not worth the time it takes to assemble it, not to mention keeping up to date on current HW trends, configurations, sockets, power supplies, mobos etc etc.
Pretty much all hardware these days are technically overspec'ed compared to the load I can put on them, so as long as your needs are not high-end, pretty much any moderately modern Xeon should do.
I just buy a preconfigured setup from Dell, it just works, and at worst I'll buy some extra RAM and drives elsewhere later.
Maybe that's not how you like it, but for me it means zero hassles, zero work and a guarantee which is for the system as a whole working unit, not just single components. I couldn't be happier, and the days of building systems myself is definitely over.
I mean, the dude's marketing agent was laid off and the new guy didn't do as good of a job (or the emails didn't reach). And?
All I needed to do was write a grumbly blog post and they'd sort it out within 3 hours? Why did nobody tell me!
In the past you have flowed about the wonders (price) of Dell on the Seattle tech startups mailing list. One stumble in the relationship, and you're telling the world how awful they are. You even went so far as to publically mock the appearance of your Dell sales rep. This type of public bullying might not produce the desired outcome. That is, if your desired outcome is to get a good price on your server and maintain a relationship with your vendor.
Sales reps are human beings, fallible and fraught with human problems. Perhaps your rep came down with a certain flu and forgot to tell his/her customers who their secondary is. As a customer of Dell, I keep all of my "sales team"'s contacts in a text file, for this very reason. (For the record, I hate dealing with Dell, and choose HP or Sun whenever I have the option.)
If you feel Dell is untrustworthy, consider moving on. HP and Sun are superior alternatives who are willing to match Dell's price. You just need to know how to work the channels (for HP call up CDW, for Sun look for Tim Van Loan). Also, Supermicro resellers like Silicon Mechanics, PogoLinux, or Penguin Computers sell servers comparable to Dell's crappy commodity hardware, and will likely beat Dell's server offerings.
From an infrastructure management point of view, your model is broken if you cannot afford a few extra days in provisioning. Consider multiple suppliers, or rethinking the model. Cloud and Dedicated server models are designed towards infrastructures that require rapid resource provisioning.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
"I love Dell servers"
"I even love their network hardware"
"Mick my old sales guy rocked!"
"As did his hardware team."
"I’m going to take my hard earned dollars and hand it over for more of that great hardware they have."
The update has even more glowing adjectives and I've chatted to both Reed and Loree today. I'm was a fan and still am. The post is tongue in cheek. So chill out.
..and I'm pretty sure it's a stock photo. But if it isn't I'll be happy to send the guy a razor.
Mark.
forget Dell