Re: Food for thought...

On Jan 22, 2:47 am, scottishpoet <drybur...@yahoo.com> wrote: > have these individuals give IBM permission to give a 3rd party their > contact details? Sigh. I think you've missed the point. IBM isn't giving the details to any third party. The idea is that having a local community of IDS users leads to better customer sat. The local sales teams have a vested interest in seeing happy customers because happy customers buy more products. In terms of IDS, it means that current customers and even prospective customers know that the rumor of IDS' demise is greatly exaggerated. So the concept is for a local IBM IM IT Sales Specialist would ask internally for support to run a report against AAS to get the list of customers and their locations within their state or states so that the IT Specialist can filter the list down to those companies that are within a reasonable driving distance. The IBM IM IT Specialist would then make the effort to identify the client teams that are responsible for those accounts, and to then work with the local account teams to identify the DBAs or interested parties. The IBM IM IT Specialist, or the account team's SSR would then reach out and let the DBAs know about a local user group's meetings and keep them in the loop on upcoming events. Nowhere does that information leave IBM. The reason an IBM IM IT Sales Specialist does this is that its part of their give back to the local user community. (This is something that can effect their band rating and future promotions.) The nice thing is that even if the IM IT Sales Specialist isn't trained on IDS, they can still contribute. The only reason that they would not want to do this is that it will take some time and effort. Usually the contact person in AAS is someone in procurement and not the DBA. This is why the IT Specialist has to go to the account team that supports the client. Also note that the account team may not be local to the region. Hyatt is an example of this. CSC's account team covers Hyatt since Hyatt outsources to CSC. So what's stopping IBM's sales staff from doing this? Little things like this just take time and no additional money. So what's their excuse? -G