[svandamme]

Busy with a new account gross value of the contract is twice my mortgage and we need a handover of security credentials.
No biggie, if it weren't for the fact that those who have to give it to us, are competitors and our sales guy basically told em to give the credentials and go F themselves.

Now we are 2 days to the deadline and sales guy asks me for custom whitepaper , a security impact analysis of what we can do in the customers network with that security account. To argue why we should get the credentials..

Never mind the fact that the competitor is still in charge of certain high level aspects of email and security, and i'm not in any way a specialist of the email platform but simply the mobile devices guy...
They are a company 100 times bigger then we are, a bigger knowledge pool, they have specialists for mail and security and they are p1ssed off at us because of our sales guy..
The customer is a bank, yeah, a bank.. So you can bet your bottom dollar that they will have security ners, geeks & goons on standby to pick my bones clean in this debate.

So either i produce a document that is spot on and basically is full of arguments why they should not give us the account.

Or i produce a crappy document which the competitor will happily as ammo to show we are incompetent..

Just escalated it to my senior mgmt, and told em that i don't appreciate being given the task of sorting out a lose-lose situation, created by our sales...

While i do understand his stress levels on the grounds that he'll lose a big commission if this falls through and i do understand the impact on our companies cash flow if we don't get this deal.../

...simple fact is, our sales guy shot himself in our collective foot and i really don't know what i can do on a technical level, that won't make it worse..
I can do a lot of things, but i cannot build goodwill with white papers if the competitor has vowed make every possible effort to make our lives miserable.
And if i were in their place, i'de do the same..

Hell, i love those kind of situations myself, there is nothing more fun then a good fight when you know the other guy will be outnumbered , outgunned and uninformed of his predicament.


Well, i'm not uninformed, so you can bet your ass i'm not going to the fight,
I wasn't born a coward, but i definitely wasn't born stupid either.