Being able to speak to people on the supply side means I get to hear a lot about how customers respond to offers of support. A great example of this was at the Learning Technologies event at Excel this year. I put one day aside to speak to people on the 5App stand and invited people to join for a free 1-1 consulting session. No-one booked a session.
Interestingly, this aspect of customer education isn’t a hurdle once products have been purchased.
It appears as if people want to buy blind and learn how afterwards.
The thing is, I know that’s not the case; I was on the other side of the fence for 30 years and am quite sure buying happens in an informed way. I’m still unsure why people aren’t keen on hearing about how they might work better when a vendor tells them.
Am I right to think this or do people ask vendors how things are done?
Lost and Desperate 
Andrew, I suspect it is a number of things, perhaps including:
buyers avoiding a sense of “owing” the deal to the supplier who did the consultation
a sense that they are being manipulated (in some strange way!!!)
the pernicious influence of procurement departments who seem to place little value in someone who knows the customer business and someone who knows the tooling working out stuff together…
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Fear of the “hard sell”.
Also, maybe those attending things such as the Learning Technologies event don’t actually have the authority to make a purchase ?
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[…] or don’t have it enabled. It might be they don’t understand how to use it and need to educate their customers. Do learning people not know where to find news outside their curated […]
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