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> Reeve Fritchman >IMHO, IBM made a big mistake a long time ago when they abandoned marketing >reps and farmed it out to 3rd parties. IBM needs real, trained sales reps >compensated to sell IBM midrange products and smart enough to deal with the >NT blather; a bunch of disorganized vendors fighting over hardware >commissions and "value add" has turned IBM's marketing on its head. The >System/3 model 6's sold by IBM marketing reps are now the big iSeries >accounts; IBM got in on the ground floor and kept the business. I don't think I agree. When the BP arrangement works the way it should it resolves a lot of problems inherent in IBM's market rep system. The reps could get pretty lazy. If you were in a certain rep's territory and had any AS/400's installed there was little incentive for your rep to really work with you. As a customer you were unlikely to shift platforms so you were a guaranteed sale at upgrade time. Also, as the technology became more complicated the sales reps and technical reps became less and less useful. Many of these folks had never actually implemented a system -- they've just talked about systems for years. They go off to IBM rep conferences twice a year to be presented the new features so they can phonetically repeat the presentations back to their customers. At best, the business party relationship allows you to hook up with someone who has actually worked with these systems, and it introduces some productive competition. At worst the BP's are no better than the reps, and the (unproductive) competition occurs between the IBM reps and their business partners. I think that "real, trained sales reps" is a good idea in theory. Keeping these people trained when they never do any real systems work is the problem. (This is, of course, IMO. Actual results may vary.) -Jim James P. Damato Manager - Technical Administration Dollar General Corporation <mailto:jdamato@dollargeneral.com>
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