"No, really, we are different than all the others you worked with"

Thus ended the plaintive cry of a management consulting hawking their wares, promising us high level meetings with “customers” with “budgets” in our space. This isn’t to say we don’t want more customers, we do. We always need more (and repeat) customers … this is the nature of our business. What we don’t need is pay-for-play. There is no shared risk, no incentive for the management consultant to deliver a set of business, as they are being paid, and that … the pay for play, is their business. We are working furiously hard trying to find people with massive storage and computing performance problems, and convince them that we do have the best platforms for this, and then sell them. We are always happy to talk to more people about how we can help them. I just think, and call me crazy, that if we are paying people for meetings, this should be after we win business. That is, we share the risk that the meeting will not pan out. Otherwise, we are just paying to play, and we are going to lose at that game. Not unlike betting against the house. Its a bad idea, you are going to lose in the long term, no matter how nicely their sales pitch to “invest” now is. /sigh