When Craig Urizzola's company decided to make a seven-figure investment in a new ERP system, he contacted his local reseller to order hardware to run it on. "We told them exactly what we wanted and said, 'We don't need SANs or clustering or any of that,'" says Urizzola, CIO at Saladino's, a food service distributor in Fresno, Calif. "But their proposal came back with SANs and 10 more servers than we asked for. They just don't listen."

That IT salespeople just don't listen is a familiar refrain from technology buyers. But despite your complaints, you know that you can't quite live without them. You need them to execute transactions and help guide you, to offer advice and recommendations, and to give you a heads up about forthcoming products that may solve real business problems.

Unfortunately, although technology has made quantum leaps over the years, salespeople haven't changed much. And today, as ever, too few of them act as honest advisers and problem-solvers. Too many are dime-a-dozen drones who stick to marketing scripts and are more concerned with selling what they want to sell than they are with selling what you need to buy.

We spoke with seasoned IT executives to uncover the sales archetypes that drive them crazy. So bar the door, unplug the phone, and read on. ( Click here for more tips on dealing with sales calls. )

The Yes Man

This person oversells his product, promising you the moon and delivering nothing but trouble. When pressed on whether the product can solve your problem, he says, "Sure! It will do that and unify all your systems and make everything run nice and smooth. And by the way, it also cures male-pattern baldness." (We're kidding about that last one. Sort of.)

The sales rep simply might not know whether the product meets your needs, but he's afraid to admit it, so he takes the easy way out, which is to nod and say yes to whatever you ask.

"A lot of salespeople pretend to know our business, but they end up giving us something we don't need," says Joshua Koppel, assistant director of IT at the Chicago Department of Revenue. He adds that salespeople frequently gloss over or altogether miss compatibility and integration issues. "We end up tweaking and tweaking, and that costs money," says Koppel.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

Whitepapers

• Symantec State of the Data Center Report
• Gene Kim's Practical Steps to Mitigate Virtualization Security Risks
• Monitoring and Managing App Performance
• Monitoring and Managing VoIP
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management
• SNMP Monitoring: One Critical Component to Network Management

View more DATA CENTER whitepapers

Webcasts

• Managing the End User Experience-A Real World Example of Success
• Best Practices for Deploying WAN Optimization for Disaster Recovery
• Tips and Techniques for Remote Data Backup and Delivery
• WAN Optimization Landscape
• Oracle Database 11g: Advances in Compression, Real Application Testing and Data Guard
• Solutions to the Toughest IT Challenges in Remote Offices

View more DATA CENTER webcasts

Special Reports

• Data Centers: At the center of the action
• Executive Guide: Data Center Decisions
• Get More From Your WAN
• Executive Guide: Storage Heats Up
• Network World Executive Guide: Perfecting Application Performance Management

View more DATA CENTER special reports