How To Be Critical

This is a follow-up post to Customers Aren’t Idiots.

I mentioned in my previous post that I’d try to list a few hints on how to provide constructive criticism, particularly for vendors who want to criticise competitors.

It’s all about tone, so here’s what I’d prefer to see.

Be Respectful

Respect your colleagues, and the competitive game that is modern commerce.

The people who work for your competitors are smart and capable. Many of them once worked for your company, and many of them will one day in the future. Ad hominem attacks are poor form, and make you look bad.

Some good natured ribbing is fine, but it’s the person on the receiving end who gets to decide if it’s good natured or not.

Show some sportsmanship, honour the game, and remember Wheaton’s Law.

Respect the Customer

Customers aren’t idiots. Respect them also.

Many of them have a deep understanding of how your products work in the real world, as distinct from your test labs. They encounter obscure corner cases you never even thought to test, and they do things with your products that never even occurred to you.

Customers may not care about the same things you do. What you think is a big deal is something they don’t even spend 5 seconds on. And what you’ve dismissed as irrelevant might be of deep concern to them. Don’t assume you always know what your customers are thinking. Or your competitor’s customers, for that matter.

And a lot of them used to work for vendors, too, or will some day.

Be Humble

Humans are fallible. It’s entirely possible that you’re wrong in your criticism. This doesn’t make you a bad person.

It’s possible that your competitor made an honest mistake. That doesn’t make them a bad person either.

If you think there’s a flaw in someone’s argument or product, try to phrase things in such a way that you’re allowing for the fact that you might be wrong. This will make it easier for you to back down if someone calls you on your mistake. A solid “Good catch! Yes, I got it wrong there, thanks for pointing it out” is the mark of someone secure in themselves.

And if you’re the one pointing out a flaw in someone else’s work, be gentle. It might be you next time. There, but for the Grace of God, go I.

Get Over Yourself

It’s IT. Most of what we’re doing isn’t discovering penicillin, or curing cancer, or creating cold fusion. Our customers might be, but we’re not.

We’re all just trying to find some meaning in our short lives while we keep our families fed and try not to mess up our kids too badly.

We’re on a very small ball of dirt in a big, cold universe.

Take a deep breath, count to ten, and be nice to your fellow humans.

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Posted in IT, Marketing, Storage, Tip.

By Justin Warren

5 July 2010

10 comments

Customers Aren’t Idiots

Another TwitPiss erupted this week between the usual suspects. Over this.

I don’t care about the topic of debate, really, since I’ve never personally used MetroCluster. I have used NetApp SnapMirror, sync and async, EMC BCVs, SRDF, EVAs and their data replication. And a bunch of other solutions to the same basic problem. Here’s my summary:

All hardware sucks. All software sucks.

The devil, as always, is in the details.

Tone is Vital

What I found most interesting was the way the debate/flamewar took place. As I mentioned to Chuck Hollis: when you’re criticising someone or something, tone is vital.

If you’re going to criticise something, particularly when you have a vested interest in that criticism (as all vendor criticism of competitors does), you need to be particularly careful about how you say things, not just what you say.

People don’t like to be told they’re wrong, that’s just human nature. If there’s a vested interest, your comments are automatically suspect.

This may not be fair, but it doesn’t make it less true.

How To Lose a Sale

This idea was driven home to me recently at a conference (NetApp Insight last year, in the interests of disclosure). I went along to a presentation on sales, and learned something I wish I’d learned years ago.

Don’t argue with the customer about decisions they’ve already made.

In this context, it was about competitor’s kit they already owned. Would you tell a prospective customer they were a total bonehead for buying a competitor’s gear instead of your own, vastly superior gear (obvious, because it’s yours. I mean, duh)? “What kind of moron would buy from company N when their gear has flaws x, y and z? Didn’t you know that?”

“Gee. Thanks for pointing that out. Yeah, all my reasons for making that purchase are idiotic on their face. Thank God you came along to sort me out Mr. Vendor. I guess I’ll take a hundred units of whatever you’re selling. Cheque ok?”

You’re insulting the very people you want to buy your gear. Does that sound like a smart sales strategy to you?

Customers Compromise

The tone of much of the criticism of MetroCluster felt like it was insulting those customers who have bought the product.

Maybe they had perfectly good reasons for not choosing something else.

Maybe they did know about all these apparently awful flaws, but didn’t care, or it wasn’t important in the larger view, or they had mitigation strategies in place.

Or maybe they don’t agree with you that they are flaws?

Jim/Calvin may have some valid technical points (I’m not going into it, as I’m no expert), but I think they missed the mark in the tone they used.

And the other vendors missed the mark by joining in a petty point-scoring pile-on. I’m not the only storage customer turned off by those sorts of antics, regardless of the vendor doing it (and you all do, sadly).

But hey, maybe there are customers who like that sort of thing and you can sell to them instead.

Constructive criticism is hard, and I’m no expert. I’ll see if I can write up some quick tips on what I’d prefer to see from a vendor’s critical review of a competitor’s product. I think it would benefit the whole industry if we all try to lift our game, yeah?

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