1

Yep, it has been a few months with the same sales rep so it must be time for a switch.

I received the ‘welcome’ email from our new sales rep and must say i am quite unaffected.

i give it about 3-6 months before we are assigned another rep.

makes me sad that the time i spent teaching the previous rep about our needs would now about to be repeated, except for the fact that I no longer order from Dell if i have a choice (wooohoooo!! 30 identical lenovo’s were ordered this am to replace a bunch of P4 machines), so will likely not ever make contact with the sales rep.

maybe next switch i will luck out and get reassigned to one i have worked with before…it has happened.

@Dell_Technologies

15 Spice ups
2

I would love to know why they keep doing that lately. It only causes confusion, and makes me want to shop elsewhere.

4 Spice ups
3

I never understood the carousel of reps. As soon as we build a relationship with one, so it takes less time to explain what we need, they yank him/her.

4

+1 for kicking Dell to the curb (we did the same a year ago)

+1 for rubbing it in their face on the Dell section of spiceworks.

1 Spice up
5

I love all our new Lenovo machines.

They come with WAY TOO MUCH junk, though.

A nice clean WIndows 7 image would be nice.

6

Funny, I’ve seen the same thing.

7

This ultimately is what made me switch to using a 3rd party vendor as my Dell Rep. I had some good Dell reps and some not so good Dell reps. Bottom line, Dell didn’t care. Now I work with a 3rd party (Directec) to buy all of my Dell stuff and the problem has been resolved. I have also managed to get better pricing this was as well.

8

There seems to be a lot of inner changing going on at Dell lately. Do you have a premier page of your own? I usually do my business building my own systems in our Premier site and don’t have to deal with my rep much until I need servers.

I’ve purchased at leas 500 laptops (Latitude, Precision) from Dell over the past 5 years and they have a 99% survival rate (not including the people who run them over or spill coffee on them).

In my last position I had to roll out 75 ThinkPad’s to sales force and that was a cluster. I’d bet they had a 25% failure rate in the first year.

I surly wouldn’t switch just because the guy I talk to on the phone is new.

I’ll stick with Dell.

5 Spice ups
9

Lately??? Been going on with us for several years now. I refer to it as our “Dell Rep of the month club”…

3 Spice ups
10

I hear you! It’s like if they’re IBM or something. Why can’t Ivan be our rep? He’s been with us here forever! :wink:

1 Spice up
11

seems like the last 2 years it’s been worse than ever.

12

Yes, Dell reps come and go and they are generally useless when configuring a quote since more of them are not “techy”. But really, its not their fault - think about it. If it was nice a workplace and a team to be part of, they would not have a daily turn around of personnel.

Depending on your partner level, you may want to deal with a bigger partner in your area as they will give you a much better discount. Yes, its funny that one may need to turn to another partner for a decent saving on hardware but that’s Dell to you. This is the reason why we have completely dropped Dell and currently in pulling all Dell equipment (SAN, servers, switches) from customers and replace them with competition.

Dell field reps are desperate for sales but they should thank their corporate counterparts for lousy sales.

13

For what it’s worth - I know this is off topic. I only bring it up because op says he purchased 30 Lenovo machines.

If you anyone is buying bulk laptops and using Teamviewer, you will need to use Microsoft’s Volumeid 2.0 to give random names to the machine disks. Instead of using a combination of IP address, machine name and mac address, Teamviewer uses the volume it to identify a pc. This is usually okay if you buy machines individually. However, when you buy bulk, you will most likely get machines that are all from the same image. If this is the case, and even if you rename all the machines in the OS, Teamviewer will still get confused between them.

I found this out after deploying several machines out across the country. I would go to support Tami in New Jersey and accidentally (and unexpectedly) open up Mark’s machine in Boise. Not only can this be embarrassing for the end user, it can be painful/time consuming to work on a machine that doesn’t need it.

It is much easier to rename the volume ids as a part of the configuration process pre deployment.

14

I appreciate that each new rep wants to establish a good rapport with you in order to better support your company’s need, but I find myself reluctant to spend the amount of time on the phone with each successor. I’ve finally resorted to a basic company profile and synopsis of our operations that I email to them when I get their contact info. It saves a considerable amount of time that I don’t have to waste, being an IT army of one.

4 Spice ups
15

What kills me is that every new rep wants to set up a meeting and go over our organizations needs… again. When we need to set up these meetings twice a year because that is how often we switch reps, it gets rather frustrating. It’s especially annoying when the sales rep thinks of us as “another big corporation” and wants to sell us $10,000 products. We don’t have that kind of budget, and never will… being a public library. When I finally get it through the head of the rep the kinds of things we DO want and need, and I finally feel comfortable with them, we get a new one.

1 Spice up
16

I’ve noticed the rep thing as well. I actually managed to hold on to a regional manager as my rep for well over a year.

I think it has to do with your line of business. When we were 100+ strong we held the same rep. Due to the housing bust, we’re now at 48 employees, pushing us from Medium sized to their SMB tier.

Initially everything was fine, but now I’ve cycled reps about 8 times. Not as often, but lately yes. I think the SMB group is used for training. Hate to think that, but but I miss my regional rep. The guy could make me a really good offer that kept me coming back.

edit

Also, I think it has to do with the amount of money you make Dell and how many purchases per year you make. If you make a lot of purchases back to back, I noticed I kept my rep longer.

17

That’s a great idea, I may have to do that for us as well. I, too, am a one man IT shop, don’t always have or want to spend that kind of time on the phone with yet another sales person.

18

I am happy with their products, but the email turnaround time (in the past year) from any sales rep is about 12 or more hours. With the typical back and forth communication that is necessary, a single order can take days or in my latest case, about 1.5 weeks. Short answer: If you find someone who is quicker, I’ll take his/her number!

19

I too had this issue years ago, I then learned of their Premier page. Now I simply go to the web site and do my ordering. I rarely need to contact a rep.

I’ve switched a lot of my purchasing to CDW though as lately Dells’ order system has encountered odd “errors” when my orders are placed, it waits for two weeks, then sends me an email, notifying me that there was an error with my order, and it was cancelled. This happened just last month with a server license I was trying to purchase…I ended up getting it in 2 days from CDW.

1 Spice up
20

Premier was our reps last hope at keeping our account. It turns out, there is nothing special in the way of Deals or saving money regarding premier. Perhaps it has changed since we signed up, but regardless, we purchase our workstations elsewhere.

I also noticed that our third party reps were able to beat out any premier price on the same product.

1 Spice up