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Right, this next section is all about the pre-Sales IT VAR experience.
And the first point I want to address with Matthew is in the post you wrote about RiverBed.
Matthew, you compared the technical side, the (IT) side of IT pre-sales for both VARs
and vendors. And if I interpreted your post right, you're implying it's difficult for
a VAR to know about all vendors' offerings, even in a space as narrow as Riverbed are
operating in but yet, I guess, you come up against customers who expect you to be able
to answer questions and do comparative responses.
How do you address that side of things in the VAR space - expected to know a lot about
many things?
Sure. Would you want to buy anything from someone who knows nothing about the product,
or competitors' products? You know, one of the things I do, and this
may sound a little cruel but, if my kids tell me they want to go somewhere or do something,
sometimes I'll say; "well, sell me on it. Sell me on why you wanna do this. Or sell
me on why I should buy this game for you, or we should go to this restaurant."
It really has to do with can you talk about something you're interested in, or even not
interested in, for that matter? Are you able to verbalize why you believe this should happen?
To translate that over from the sale; on the technical side, I expect, if I'm buying something
from you for you to come and actually add some value. At least, from a VAR. If you're
a vendor I know you're going to speak highly of your product and that's the one thing you
love and everybody else (has) an inferior product.
Well, from a VAR perspective, add some value there.
So, yes it's tough. Yes, it's hard. There's plenty of times I've had to say I don't know
the answer to that. I can find out but I don't know the answer to that. And a lot of customers
understand the sheer magnitude of all this information you have to be aware of.
But if you want to win, if you want to be good at your job, you gotta put the hours
in. And unfortunately, this is the lot you're dealt in life (if you're doing pre-sales for
a VAR.) You have to, you know, you have to get beyond mediocrity if you want to consistently
win deals. So, it's tough, it may not be fair. But that's
life.
So, you're doing a fair amount of studying then, I would imagine? (when you have a moment.)
There's some things that you work with enough to where it's not as burdensome. You know,
we do a fair amount of routing and switching work, say, for Cisco or Brocade. You know,
it's not too much of a burden for me to run through the various, say, switching platforms
from Cisco. That's a very, almost commoditized, product
where most of the time it doesn't really matter which vendor you use.
But you start getting into other things out there, specific things, you know, WAN App,
Load balancing, to a certain degree; network management platforms. And you have to put
in the hours.
And the more you do it, obviously the more comfortable you become with that solution
and hopefully with the other vendor solutions out there but it's always changing.
And one thing I always tell people, if they're wanting to get into this field, is it's not
an 8 to 5 job. If you do this 8 to 5 you will lose consistently, over the course of your
career. When you pay people to hold the job down and hide in some large corporation somewhere,
but if you really want to make the most of your career it has to be more than 8 to 5.
So, I probably study more working for a VAR than I did as an end customer.
Probably, to the point of it's probably 10 to 15 hours a week at least (of professional
development on the side.)
I'm lucky I get to do some of that during the course of the day if I don't have work
I'm supposed to be doing for a client. My company is very, very focused on allowing
the engineering staff to do professional development. Because that makes us better overall.
Great, yeah. I know in some of your earlier posts that was one of the reasons why you
left corporate IT and you chose the VAR challenge, and you realized that it's going to be a totally
different set of skills to, maybe, juggle. You're not specializing; I know what it's
like, I've worked in corporate IT but I haven't done what you've done, and worked it the VAR
space. So, it's very interesting to hear that learning never stops, I guess. As you say,
you're gonna fail if it does.
I think working in a job where I could max out in six months, I couldn't do that. I couldn't,
I wouldn't be happy. So the beauty of IT is that you can never learn it all. And I never
will learn it all. In twenty years from now, thirty years from now, when I retire, I'll
retire knowing that I lonely learned, you know, ten, twenty five percent of what I wanted
to know. That's what makes it fun.
Yes, indeed.
For everybody watching this call and interested in an IT career, and there might be if it
ends up on YouTube, people do come across it; so pay attention to what Matthew's telling
you.
OK, I think we've ended that question. It was a great answer. Thank you.