One of the primary reasons for my post yesterday was my annoyance at the number of cold callers that I have been receiving, but I accidentally hit publish instead of save draft so I decided to have this as a multi-part post.

What tipped me over the edge yesterday was a salesman from Corporate Express ringing about APC products. I don’t mind the cold callers, I can normally get rid of them pretty easily but this guy was persistent and was very annoying and actually didn’t even listen to what I was saying – I find that last bit extremely rude and didn’t appreciate that, probably should have spoken to his boss.

To make matters worse today I received another phone call from Corporate Express – this time it was a different guy trying to sell Lenovo products. Again he wouldn’t take no for an answer and was very pushy. He even started the spiel about the 30% government capital expenditure tax deduction – I have heard the spiel from a few people now, it goes something like this – if you buy capital equipment you get 30% of the cost back from the government. In a round about way that is correct – but its only a deduction we don’t actually receive a cheque back from the government for 30% of the cost.

I understand that suppliers are only trying to cover their own asses but where have they been for the last 5 years, I never (and now will never) deal with Corporate Express for IT Products (I don’t believe we even deal with them for stationary supplies, despite the fact they are just around the corner) because of the total lack of respect show by 2 of their sales people.

For us the cost is the most important aspect when making a purchasing decision and 90% of our IT equipment purchases are done online and 95% of those purchases are completed without a problem. We have in the past had excellent relationships with local suppliers who supplied product as well as support for the product, but today the support is provided by myself and we aren’t required to pay the additional price which is being asked for by these types of suppliers. We still have regular contact with at least 2 of these suppliers they understand our needs and regularly are able to provide pricing which is very close to online suppliers for large scale printers and wide format printers in particular but sadly for basic parts and PCs they are unable to compete with the online retailers and Statice Ice.

Apart from the issues with the Corporate Express guys, I have had ERP system vendors contact me, mobile application vendors contact me and other hardware vendors contact me 99% of them we have never had a relationship with in the past. Our 2 locals suppliers make contact about once a month to make sure we are still operating and to generally have a chat about business – they are phone calls I enjoy, because they aren’t trying to force me into buying anything.

update: Corporate Express rang again today – that is 3 times in 2 days. I told them to take me off their contact list and don’t want to be contacted by them again – the guy was reasonable about it – lets see if they ring again
another update: Corporate Express rang again today – I told the guy it was the fourth call in the week and he didn’t seem to think it wasn’t too bad – I told him I didn’t appreciate it, he assure me they wont ring again.

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