How to bypass sales-speak and get the info you need

In a perfect world, we’d all have the time and resources to evaluate every potential solution. But more often than not, we’re asked to make critical decisions with very little time to do proper research and weigh the alternatives.

One result is that you find yourself in the unfortunate position of having to rely solely on the input of salespeople when making important decisions. Don’t get me wrong — some of my best friends are salespeople. A good salesperson (and there are many) will consider your business goals and recommend a product that works well for you at the best price point, just like a trusted advisor would. Sure, they get a commission, but they provide a service in exchange. If time proves the recommendation wise, they know you’ll come back again.

Of course, it’s no secret that many salespeople are more interested in making a down payment on a boat than in getting you a good deal. This seems especially true in the storage market. With a big-ticket sale, the motivation to cultivate a long-term relationship built on trust may be trumped by a yearning to get in, grab your cash, and head for the hills.

The good news is that these sales lizards are fairly easy to spot (the tail is a dead giveaway).

The bad news is that even sincere sales folks who try to do a great job may simply repeat the FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) fed to them. Salespeople, particularly those without a technical background, tend to rely upon the education provided to them by storage manufacturers.

One of the foundations of that education is the internal competitive analysis paper. If the manufacturer is doing a good job, you as a customer will never see one of these (they are usually provided to salespeople under NDA). They list the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the manufacturer’s product versus a competitor’s product with instructions on how to downplay the weaknesses, hard sell the strengths, and cultivate doubt in competitors’ products.

I’ve seen a number of these position papers myself. They’re about 50 percent straight truth, 40 percent slightly skewed statistics, and 10 percent outright fabrication. You can’t really blame the poor sales guy for repeating half-truths that he’s been taught as fact. But when you sense he’s working from a playbook, a few well-placed questions may quickly suss out the truth.

My favorite question: “Tell me three bad things about this product and explain why I should buy it anyway.” No product under the sun, especially something as complex as enterprise storage, completely lacks drawbacks. There are always design trade-offs. You want SAN snapshots that won’t impact transactional write performance? No problem, but chances are they probably won’t be very capacity-efficient. You want to support dedupe on your primary storage? No problem, but you’ll probably need to add a bunch more controller capacity to really use it effectively.

The answer you get to that question will tell you volumes, both about the product itself and the person trying to convince you to buy it. If they can’t or won’t give you an answer at all, say thanks and hang up the phone. Either they don’t know or aren’t willing to tell you; either way, that person is not going to be able to give you what you need. If you get good answers, you will likely have learned the first three things that would have irritated you after you had signed on the dotted line and tried to put the product into production. Then you can figure out how much those things actually mean to you.

It’s also a good idea to ask very specific technical questions and see what kinds of answers you get. For example, you might ask, “How many randomized 4K read and write IOPS can I push to a 10GB file on this device?” Chances are you’ll probably be greeted with a blank stare. And that’s OK, but press for an answer. If they immediately offer to get a technical person involved who can answer it, excellent. Technical folk are usually a little freer with details and can be good resources for you in the future (get a business card!).

In that particular example, the actual answer to the question itself isn’t all that useful unless you really know storage well. Getting an apples-to-apples comparison across different product lines — with different types and numbers of disks, different RAID algorithms, and different amounts of cache — takes a fair amount of analysis that may be impossible without having both devices sitting in front of you on a lab bench. The point is not so much to get a hard number you can use for comparison, but to get a feel for the company and how much of what you’re hearing is FUD versus good advice.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to do the product research yourself, nor the option to delegate that research to someone on your team with the time and ability, you’re going to need to trust someone. And the only way to determine who to trust is to ask the right questions. Tune your ear for answers intended to stir up fear, uncertainty, and doubt — and show the door to the salespeople who give them. FUD is almost always a red flag that you’re not getting the whole story.

This article, “How to bypass sales-speak and get the info you need,” originally appeared at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Matt Prigge’s Information Overload blog and follow the latest developments in storage at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.