I remember a time when you knew what your competitors were up to. You knew what the competitive features were in their products, you had to. If you didn’t there was no way to arm your sales / marketing folks with proper product positioning (say that 4 times fast). As of late it seems like that tradecraft is dying. There really is no need for it to die with all the publicly available information available these days like analyst reports (OK..public if you want to pay), magazine bakeoffs, product certification, etc. The days of having to dumpster dive for that kind of information have passed for the most part. Here is a good link on dumpster diving for those who have no Idea what I am talking about en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumpster-diving
What set me off? I “competitive positioning” paper that a security vendor gave me yesterday. As Security Practice Manager for a solutions provider I get hit constantly by security vendors telling me how great their product is. We are very selective about whom we partner with. One of our established partners came in and gave me this paper on how their product /company is better than Company X. This is a security vendor who probably spends more on sales & marketing than the GDP of a small country. I don’t know who wrote the paper but they should be fired, no joke. The person who wrote this has never seen Company X’s product or even been to their web site. There were so many factual errors it was ridiculous. Wait, that’s not the best part. There were almost as many errors about their own product!!!!.
I’m speechless….
–Chris
Technorati Tags: Idiots, Idiot, more idiots
May 31st, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Sales and marketing departments of Security vendors don’t know anything about security these days. Even if you gave them good information they wouldn’t even know it. Even when you have something good and you yell jump and scream the sales and marketing folk still don’t get it. How hard is it to understand if “X competitor can’t scan content within XYZ file types” - yet we can, go after them.