Sales calls
Here is an email I just sent to a developer I was in contact with during a software product trial. Names have been changed to avoid any prejudice to people or a company that may have nothing to do with this.
Judy,
I do not know to whom I should send this email so I send it to you. I have been harassed by your Salesman Martin Something. He would not understand that I was not in a position at this time to invest the time and money in XTest. He kept coming back at me trying to convince me that I was wrong. I have rarely heard someone so pushy on a sales call. This has not helped the case of your company at all.
Now I do not want to be picked by someone else from your company that will try to sell me the product in a better way. The purpose of this email is just to let someone know that I am pissed off.
If you are a sales person, and think of using pressure tactics on me, do it well. It takes some time for me to realize I am being pushed around. Too much time. But once I tell you that I realize I am pushed, and if you insist, I will suddently switch mood and there is NO way I will ever do business with you anymore.
Update: I received an email from someone who had guessed the company. He also told me that he experienced the same kind of conversation with one of their sales guy: "when I told him I wasn't interested in buying their product, he began harassing me, telling me our methodology was doomed to failure without their product, blah blah blah. I had to get really ugly with him before he finally went away. ". This sounds too familiar to be true.
Since I did not receive any reply to the above email I sent them, here is the name: The company is Parasoft (http://www.parasoft.com) and their product is named JTest. JTest is an automated Java unit testing and coding standard analysis product based on JUnit. They sell it at around 18K per CPU. So again, it is JTest from Parasoft software.
Update2: I had actually received a reply email from this salesrep on Friday at the office. He apologized for being persistant , and gave me a 30 days trial license key (previous trial keys were for 5 days trials which is totally insufficient).
I think this company is afraid that developers will use the trial to generate all the tests on their project, and get a report of all bad coding practices, then throw the product out the window to save 18K$. Therefore, 30 days gives probably enough time to fix the code and setup the tests. 5 days on the other hand gives enough time to see the potential of the product but not enough to setup all tests and fix all the code at once. But the real issue they should focus on, in my opinion, is whether or not the potential customer will eventually be able to pay the license.
