The place where I work, regret a decision to use Oracle, our application build with Oracle Form Builder, which is awfully hard to use, broken easily. But I must admit, their pre-sales really good at describing their product, my boss really hooked up by them. "Oh, for that problem we have this, it will cost this much, but for now, you can just use it for free" then some wild invoice came to our office.
The dept I used to work at was mostly ex-B4 people and I later did enterprise consulting later: What happens is that sales people talk to people high enough up on the food chain that they get the run of the place, and so it's nearly impossible to kick them out or refuse their requests without a substantial political cost/justification. It's called "building a beachhead" and involves the engagement team worming their way up to a client's CTO or even CEO, if possible. I've been deployed as a client-facing "technical"# consultant, and I got really good at it (if I do say so myself): creating additional staff roles, developing opportunities and frenimizing other consulting shops... without inventing things that didn't need doing or creating bullsh!t jobs.
# My mind was more on how to grow the business while simultaneously helping the client fix their deployments. Seriously, the sales guy was dead weight and dumb as a bag of broken rocks but looked good in suit and could talk in nonstop sports metaphors and bizease clichés.
The measure of how a software company values its customers is in the post-sales support... just asking some users how it's going is better than hiding out or DKing them. (About '03/'04, Dell took us out to see the server factory in Round Rock, but went radio silent after a significant purchase.)
I was in a situation where they were selling something to a business leader that my side of the org wasn't in favor of buying (5x cost difference). I drew the short straw and got to meet with them and the business leadership people.
In the meeting, I literally had this dude and his presales guys in $5000 suits sitting across the table from me, berating our position and demanding (quote was "You have no fucking business saying no until you provide us with <our numbers> so we can do your ROI") all sort of crap from us. Ended up prodding the salesbot and let him run his mouth for awhile until he said something really stupid that ostracized the business folks on our side.
Wow that's wildly aggressive. I know people say 'push for the sale' but that seems counterproductive. It seems like they would have got further if they listened more.
iSCSI purchase that was promised to be supported on CentOS (it wasn't: RHEL only, despite no deltas), and which Dell itself didn't understand. Ended up getting RHEL just to get a comparison baseline install.
At one point, got cussed out by Dell's support manager in the process (the front-line support team was good). The quote was "I'm not here to support you." Ultimately cost me my job (though we did get the product running).
I'm usually pretty free with sharing my documentation, but in this case made an exception: Dell's support was so fucking crap I refused to provide any assistance for them at all.
Dell's academic-facing sales force (sales and support are their core business value) seemed to start sucking around 2007+. For enterprise IT critical boxes, I would today probably shop around IBM, HP, Cisco, Dell but for web I would go the ODM/OEM route if it were a big enough order. For test lab stuff, Unixsurplus FTW.
(Dell tried to hire me thrice because I could actually use Visio to communicate visually and detail drilling quotes (BOMs) to ferret out upselling and ensure we had supportable configurations (SANs and such). I even had the pleasure to due-diligence several of their solution presentations across the table from 6 of their SE's in Round Rock with the worst hangover of my life, and we still managed to extract maximum intel from that meeting. Dell's client reception secretaries helpfully stocked boxes-upon-boxes of Advil and Tylenol samples and a righteous Keurig binge didn't hurt either. Interestingly, Dell+Redhat had a massive champagne orgy in an adjoining room and we wondered what sort of treatment the several megabucks USD customer level receives, hopefully not just a backpack or stay at the Dell cobranded hotel.)
