Comment by paulg2222
2 days ago
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
2 days ago
You are the norm in that you seem to be communication-averse. Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
> you seem to be communication-averse
Not OP, but I worked for years as a telemarketer as a teenager, so I'm not afraid of speaking on the telephone. However, as I've aged I've found that I'm extraordinarily bad at thinking on my feet and it is for this reason that I loathe telephone calls now.
I was raised to be a people-pleaser and no matter how many times I read "When I say no, I feel guilty" my gut instinct during conversations in which I have to think on my feet is to do whatever is necessary to avoid conflict with the person with whom I'm speaking. With e-mail and other asynchronous communication methods, this is not the case for me as I have the time to craft the gentle-no or the push-back or to properly word the uncomfortable question.
This might be the very reason they prefer to call you, to force you into rushed decisions. Because otherwise I can't imagine the reason for spending scheduling time and minutes (hours) of chitchat just to answer a couple of very basic and totally repeatable question.
I have the same problem as the parent comment, and over time, I learned that people would take advantage of it, just as you mentioned. So, I decided to make my default response to every offer: 'Let me think about it, and I'll call you back.' Sometimes I only ask for one hour, but I always need some time to think on my own about the opportunity and make a sensible decision. This habit has improved things a lot for me!
Since getting married, I've gained an additional great excuse: 'I just need to check with my wife about this important decision.'
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Yup. Used to do sales. People are make way better decisions async (over email) than in person or on a call. People feel pressure to say yes in the moment and then the cost of later saying no is much greater than it would have been to say no over email.
The stress and all the negatives people are posting about here is the point.
Before you demonize any company doing this... Know just about every company with a product has a sales team of some kind and they are all operating with similar models. You are being annoyed by some sales people while the sales people at your company are annoying someone else.
Not the parent, but I love communication. I love being able to send a chat message to a teammember and get a response in an hour, or an email at 8pm and read the response next morning. What I hate is having to schedule calls for next Friday just to get a response to a basic question, or being dragged into pointless half an hour meeting just to say two sentences about what I'm doing today.
But you're right that non-technical managers seem to love that stuff
They're maybe the same managers who love the RTO for the sake of RTO.
Some of us are time-wasting averse. I am never going to recommend a product without a lot of answers, and it is never going to get green-lighted without my boss feeling confident of the answers. The faster I get the answers, the more likely we are to follow-up. When getting answers is like pulling teeth, other solutions get considered, including "develop something in-house".
> Technical staff don't make purchasing decisions anyway.
That isn't true at all, at least not at all companies. And even when the final decision isn't made by technical staff, technical staff often have an influence on the decision unless the procurement process is particularly dysfunctional.
They're not communication-averse. They're just not stupid.
The human on the other end is an experienced, well-paid, highly incentivized sales specialist, whose job is, to put it bluntly, to screw you over as much as they possibly can. Talking to them means entering negotiations on their terms. Unless you're well-versed in dealing with salespeople, they will play you like a fiddle. The business of their company relies on clients clueless enough, or big enough to not be sensitive to losses at this scale. It's plain stupid to engage from a severely disadvantaged position if you have any alternative available.
This applies doubly if they're cold-calling you. They are the hunter searching for easy marks. You are caught by surprise and entirely unprepared for the confrontation. The right thing to do is to stay quiet and let them go chase someone else.
I absolutely love communication, meeting people, etc. as far as it makes sense! Typically is much better written. Everything can be forwarded, is documented, no misunderstandings…
I agree about everything you wrote except the misunderstandings. Written communication absolutely can and do give rise to misunderstandings.
I doubted for a second, as I wrote that. Yes, written communication can lead to misunderstanding, but more often in chat. Mails are a little better in that regard in my experience. Because they are saved and seen by many people, is easier to analyze what has been said, context, etc.
But in general I would say, both can generate misunderstandings, but lets say mail is easier to settle down.