Do you really want BB customers?

Story: New Anti-Linux Propaganda from Microsoft Total Replies: 2
Author Content
jhansonxi

Sep 07, 2009
9:09 PM EDT
At what level of training and support effort does a customer become a liability? Considering the technical aspects of the training (none whatsoever) is a typical BB employee's "expertise" worth anything? Is it a benefit to have a clueless salesperson promoting your product for basis reasons to an even more clueless customer?
cberlo

Sep 08, 2009
4:12 PM EDT
Clueless or not, it seems to drive a rather thriving business. There's really not that much difference training a sales person to support Ubuntu or any other "desktop-oriented" Linux as compared to having your sales force push Microsoft Windows latest flavour. The difference, however, is that you get bulk discounts if you train everyone on the same thing. Granted, I doubt that much training is going on, and it's largely a self-service issue; in this case, it should be more up to the sale person to take the initiative and know the real story, not just "The Facts(R)".
jdixon

Sep 08, 2009
4:18 PM EDT
> ...in this case, it should be more up to the sale person to take the initiative and know the real story, not just "The Facts(R)".

In this case, knowing the "real story" is immaterial. As a sales person, your job is to get sales without getting an upset customer. Unless the customer asks for Linux, you can safely assume he/she has never heard of it, and won't object to being steered toward Windows.

Now, if you sell a customer a Linux box you get the sale for the Linux box. If you sell them a Windows box, you get the sale for the Windows box, Windows, a virus scanner suite, probably Office, and equally probably as service call every 6 to 12 months. Given that, what do you think you average sales person is going to sell them?

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