For the third time this week, a software vendor salesperson made sure to slip in how one of their fancy clients do things with their software. They don't just come out and say, "Obama endorses our software." Rather, they say, "when the Obama team logs in, they enjoy the following features...". Wow, Obama for real? I guess the software must be great!
Normally I just ignore this stuff like I ignore annoying radio talk show billboards on the highway - you know the ones, where the sleezy male DJ has his arms draped around some swimsuit models. But the last vendor to do this actually dropped a name of one of our clients. And, this client is actually dissatisfied with this product, and has been for almost a year now. Whoa, back up there! I found myself asking lots of questions to the vendor about the tools this client "enjoyed" in the system, and what makes this such a great fit for them.
Donning the hat of a real SPY (Software Private eYe?), I made sure to stay underground, never divulging my connection to the client. As I mined into the questions, I realized the salespeople knew nothing about how the client actually uses the system. As it turns out, the client has never worked with these sales people. The sleezy vendor is just using this client as a billboard to sex up their product, and its all a complete lie.
After ratting them out to my client, I felt a little better, and a little sadder. It left me wondering, how many consultants and vendors name drop with such impunity? I mean, should I just show up at, say, Apple's doorstep and lob a marketing plan at them, then run? They might never know what hit them... I guess FivePaths could claim to have contracts with Comcast and AT&T;, and we have received significant praise from major banking institutions telling us how valuable we are to them. Who cares what these contracts are, or whether the praise came in the form of credit card junk mail?
Maybe we should do a term search across the websites of all known consultant and software vendors to see how many of them claim to work with the same big names? Hey, we could aggregate all this in [insert favorite CMS here] and allow comments! Snopes for name droppers. Thats what we need!
