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  5. The Vendor Pitch Revisited: Page 2 of 3
Careers and Certifications

The Vendor Pitch Revisited: Page 2 of 3

What's gone wrong, and how it might be fixed
June 13, 2008
  • DO limit the time of each call. Thankfully, most suppliers are willing to tailor their speech to fit a listener's time. But the audible intake of shocked breath at such a request shows that many presentations are set for over a half-hour -- by which time many reporters turn into deaf pumpkins. Keep it short. You can always have a follow-up call.
  • DON'T treat the listener like a student or employee. Some vendors simply want to scroll through slides at their own pace, even if they say, "Feel free to interrupt." Some pretend not to hear a question. Some say, "Got that?" after each slide, as though speaking to a subordinate. All of it gets a raspberry.
  • DON'T use the speaker phone. Vendors love speakerphones, perhaps because it gets more people on the call while allowing them to control the "message" from a remote office. Unfortunately, what passed for acceptable audio quality in 1994 no longer cuts the mustard. Usually, these sessions wind up as a chorus of anonymous voices or just plain screaming matches -- to say nothing of the pathetic stage-whispered side conversations that somehow get passed along despite the technology. Forget it.
  • DON'T have participants use cellphones. See reference to audio quality above. And bluntly, anyone who can't take the time out for a call isn't worth mine.
  • DON'T try to control the message. In-house performance tests, commissioned survey results, and "coin operated" analyst comments fall into this category. Nobody believes them, so why waste time on them? An example: This week, a storage supplier decided to release a product, but only provided press folk with access to customer tesimonial through selected analysts. In my view, this kind of filtering says you really don't have a testimonial or you've got something to hide.

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