“Listen, you work for me, okay?”
A prospective client said this to me recently, and at that moment I knew that the deal was not worth pursuing. Forget the money and forget the size of the deal, because if you enter into such a relationship with a customer things will eventually end poorly for everyone involved including the customer.
Good sales people and consultants do not work for their customers. Good sales
I recently attended NetApp Insight in Las Vegas, and I was hoping to write a daily blog article while at the event. That plan was quickly replaced by the reality that I was going to be working each night from my hotel room. Despite my attempts to have all projects in a stable state before leaving for the conference unexpected needs arose and my agenda had to be put aside to deal with these new workloads. The result
From today until Thursday I am attending the NetApp Insight partner conference, and I will be blogging each day about what I have learned and discovered while here. Of particular interest to me is news surrounding NetApp and Cisco’s FlexPod validated designs, further enhancements to NetApp’s Clustered Data ONTAP operating system, and the roadmaps for NetApp’s various filer models.
While that is the plan, what
Ask any IT professional how they would verify that a network connection is up and active, and it is certain that you will receive an answer almost instantly in response. From manually typing in the command to ping an IP address to receiving an alert from a monitoring system this is a very simple task to accomplish for most IT professionals. It has been drilled into our heads time and time again that the network can
It is tempting in sales to think that we can come in and immediately sell a completely new infrastructure all at once to our customer that will instantly improve their lives and business. The problem with this thinking is that it treats the customer’s IT infrastructure like an asset that can simply be dumped and replaced with a more lucrative offering. Some customers also believe in this myth of “If I just had
A ship at sea has a starving crew. From the crow’s nest the lookout cries “Land, ho!” and points to the horizon where there is an island saturated with lush greens and coconut laden palm trees. The captain orders that the ship turnabout, and as soon as the bow is oriented with the island straight ahead of it the captain barks:
“Full stop! Drop anchor!”
From that point on the ship never moves and the crew
Occasionally I am asked by someone what should they, or possibly their child, do to get a job in the IT industry. The question is often asked with the hope that I will suggest a course, book, certificate, or some other finite “do-this-and-get-that” task that upon completion will qualify that person to do IT work. There are many great courses, books, certificates, and other such things that will help a person st
“We do not have the budget for that.”
I hear this a lot in my role as a pre-sales solutions architect. I have no problem with this statement being made. I might be pre-sales, but the price of the solution is not my focus. My role is to evaluate the needs of the business and to explore what technologies will properly address those needs. I then present a design using those technologies to the customer.
I also as
This week was not a pleasant one. My father was in the hospital until Friday (he is now home recovering from surgery), many different projects escalated to priority status simultaneously, and the kicker to this week was that as of Friday evening my home has been without power due to a severe storm knocking out power lines. Sometimes the road gets a little bumpy, but for this week it seems that the road was paved wi
The older I get the more that I want to improve myself. Right now I am in the process of training for my first 5K run as I want to lose a few pounds. I am not a strong runner, so my training results in various aches and pains despite following a workout plan designed to keep me from overworking my muscles. This does not mean that my training program is a bad one, or that I cannot accomplish my goal of running the r
