Re: Cisco as Big Brother (Was Re: Cisco's AIP vs HSSI)

["Paul J. Zawada" <zawada () ncsa uiuc edu>]

For the record, my Cisco saleperson and pre-sales engineer have always been
supportive of my efforts to run a multi-vendor network and never has laid
any of this "it's a priveledge to work with Cisco" crap on me.  They don't
do a hard sell to get my business, but that's OK since I prefer to talk to
salespeople only when I need something from them...  They don't hesitate to
say they're better than everybody else, but they do continue to work for me
instead of the other way around.  (What salesperson doesn't claim to work
for the company that's better than everyone else?)

Having said that, there are certainly some salespeople with Cisco that are,
to be polite, overzealous in their dealings with customers.  These types of
salespeople (whatever company they sell for) should be chased away
immediately.  It seems that most people that I've talked to that have had
this experience with Cisco have been from Europe (not to say it doesn't
happen in the US), so I wonder if for one reason or another the Cisco
European salesforce tends to work that way.  It's too bad for Cisco, because
if they'd had used this tactic on me, I would have certainly shown them the
door...  


--zawada

At 06:30 AM 10/16/96 +0100, Peter Galbavy wrote:
> > The salespeople in the UK are using that tactic too?  If a sales rep 
> > EVER walked into my office and fed me a line like that, I would end the
> > meeting right there.  As it is, I refuse to do business with Cisco not
> > because of their products, but because of their marketing department
> > and their corporate attitude of "We're the best, nobody can touch us,
> > and if you want to buy our product you better bend over backwards to do
> > what we want you to do."  That was their attitude three years ago when
> > our company was just getting started, and I haven't noticed it change
> > much today.
>
> No. I think the phrase *actually* used at a meeting (I was elsewhere
> that day) was "It is a priveledge to deal with a market leader like
> Cisco." This was the Cisco sales rep, not us. sigh.
>
> Buy! Buy! Bye Bye. :-P
>
> Regards,
> -- 
> Peter Galbavy                                           peter () wonderland org
> @ Home                                                 phone://44/973/499465
> in Wonderland                              http://www.wonderland.org/~peter/
>                               snail://UK/NW1_6LE/London/21_Harewood_Avenue/
Paul J. Zawada, RCDD     | Senior Network Engineer
zawada () ncsa uiuc edu     | National Center for Supercomputing Applications
+1 217 244 4728          | http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/People/zawada

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