Re: Smoking 9-3

Convince yourself that you do NOT need the car before you walk in. If you have any other mental state, you'll let yourself get taken.

Bob

There will be a test drive and plenty of questions about the condition of the car before we start talking price. Hopefully there will no blue smoke coming from the exhaust.

I have the numbers from Edmunds.com as a price basis. I will be pull> >

Surely we digress, (but what is the USenet for ?)

I'm amazed at how little the Salesmen actually know about the cars they sell. If I was a Salesman, I'd study every brochure, every feature, history of the cars, known issues, magazine reports, etc. I'd be a guru. A fountain of information. I can't believe how many Salesmen you run into that don't even know which models come with which features. You learn more in 15 minutes of reading the factory brochure than they know.

I found the same oddity in real estate. Agent's don't know their properties. They work a particular area... maybe a dozen properties a week come on the market in the burbs. If I was a RE broker, I'd go see each new property (they all have keys), look it over, and be able to describe it to the potential customer in detail. Instead, they take you out there and are as surprised as you at what you find.

I guess I'm to ambitious... speaking of which, I have to go work :-)

Bob

You would think so wouldn't you. I couldn't even dream of trying to sell something that I hadn't done even half decent reasearch on. If it didn't make me happy that I knew enough for the questions I would ask, I don't think I would have the front to try and bluff a customer.

I'm a programmer with an ISP, and our IT sales guys know little or nothing in many cases about what they sell.

They openly promise the customer exactley what they want, at a standard product price, then come and tell us Techs this. Sometimes it is physically impossible, other times it is financialy impossible.

But we end up getting the calls because "the Account Manager" who is supposed to be the only contact with the Customer, "goes missing" as soon as the customer rings.

Yea, BS artists. The people who always impressed me were the tech writers. They wouldn't even read the specs, but they'd do the documentation. Most of the time they even got it right.

I was in a similar situation at a start-up. The Sales people would go talk to the customers and "design" new features for us to implement. Then they 'ed com back and sit down with the CEO and show him all the money the company would make. Last stop on the train was the development department where the VP's would drop by. They would never ask if it was possible or when it was possible, just "can we have it next week".

Bob

I've done a fair amount of tech writing, and I've found that the specs seldom reflected the reality that actually got implemented. The specs may be an OK starting point, but your time is better spent verifying what the product actually DOES rather than what somebody once thought it might do.

A good tech writer will understand the product better than the engineers, because the engineers generally have a narrow and intensely in-depth view of a small part of the system. My wife is about the ONLY person who fully understands the huge product she writes manuals and training for (and she also teaches the training), because nobody else pays attention to the whole picture. They're too busy looking at the cells of their piece of bark to even see the trees, let alone the forest.

Gary

Hey, hey... what are you saying about the coders ?

Actually, you left out part of my post. Remember what I said about the VP's coming down and asking for all those new features by next week ? Guess what gets sacrificed first when you try to do 3 weeks of work in 3 days ? :-)

Bob

Been one for decades. That's why I'm a good tech writer. :-)

I also know specs are often a "we think this is what we're going to implement" document that usually gets written before real design & coding starts, and seldom gets updated afterward. Reality & VPs being what they are, there are usually some changes that happen in the meantime, so a writer should get down & dirty with the product to see what it really does.

What was that you said about digressing?? :-)

You can have it fast, or you can have it right. Can't have both. Gary