It worked in this instance. Sometimes your boss is just a tool and you suffer the consequences.
I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.
Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That was my last day on the job.
I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.
>I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.
Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap.
The salesperson didn't design, spec, or build the hardware. He didn't architect or write the drivers, he didn't QA the product, and he damn sure didn't assume the company would sell something that didn't/couldn't work.
Where the hell was your QA manager? Your product manager? Those are the folks that should be responsible for this - not the salesperson.
> Yeah - that's not on the salesperson. The basic 'social contract' when someone takes a sales job is that the product the company sells isn't a fraudulently useless piece of crap.
It is not unambiguous, but I got the impression from this paragraph that the salesperson sold it despite directives to the contrary, which surely is on him or her:
> I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.
Sales teams can't sell anything that operations and product management don't approve. A customer can send in a PO for anything, but the company has to accept it...
Without knowing any details, though, how can you make that conclusion? Sales people (especially in high-touch enterprise sales like this) do often promise and sell things they know they shouldn't. They should be well aware of the limitations of the software. I don't know how you felt there was enough information to decide who was to blame in this situation.
It all depends. From what the parent posted, the issue was the software and hardware combination didn't work. If this was a 'known' issue and it was sold anyways then this is definitely something within the sales organization. It perhaps was a 'known' to the parent but never communicated out to the management or sales staff.
However want to point out that the purpose of a sales organization is to sell. typically a sales organization will sell every and anything to the client. It is normal to sell features that are not implemented, or configurations that are problematic.
This was a MicroAge computer store selling equipment in 1985-1987/8 when I was there.
We had no QA beyond burning in kit ourselves before giving to the customer. Everything was simply vendor-supported hardware and software.
In this case it was Novell hardware back when Novell ran on your PC and there was no such thing as a dedicated Novell server. Those came after the hardware I'm talking about.
The software was a point of sale system (the name of which I no longer remember) and had to be network aware. From memory it was so the software could push transactions to another PC.
Anyway when the sales guy approached me and asked if we could sell the system I said no. The vendors had made it clear that the mix of network card and software didn't work and wasn't supported. We learned the hard way when another customer (the guy's brother) started having problems when we expanded his network.
It turned out the network vendor (Gateway?) had upreved their cards and the new ones caused reboots when used with this point of sale software. We had to call the distributor and beg for some older version cards to make the brother's system stable.
So the sales guy hears this explanation and goes to the boss and asks for permission to sell the systems since "We can just request old cards." Boss asks me, I say no because we can't guarantee getting old cards and as stated everyone in my support chain have washed their hands of this combination.
But the customer is price sensitive, it works for his brother and he's saying sell me this or no sale. So the sales guy writes a quote anyway. He knows my boss will feel obligated to honor the quote, and he did, so we sold the system.
In the end the store owner was screwed by his investment partners but that's a story for another day.
Hopefully you understand now why I thought the sales guy should pay for the replacement.
I specifically advised my boss not to sell a certain hardware and software combination because it was problematic. In fact eventually the vendor dropped all support. But one of our sales guys got dollar signs in his eyes and sold it anyway to a customer of ours.
Sure enough I was regularly sent out to "do something" to fix it because the systems kept crashing. Finally my boss gave me one of those "if you don't fix it today, don't bother coming back to work tomorrow" ultimatums. What exactly am I supposed to do? Rewrite the network driver for this LAN card myself? That was my last day on the job.
I heard from a friend the company had to rip the entire network out and give a new one free to customer after he threatened to sue. I never did hear if the sales guy had to pay for it.