Firing Clients

In all my proselytizing about the virtues of Civil 3D and other Autodesk products I've come into contact with several clients I think, "Are these people really worth my angst?"

I've got a handful of examples of clients that I've advised a sales person to run far, far away from:

Example 1:
There was the one group of people who had seen a demo by my esteemed colleague Russ. To my annoyance, the sales person thew a demo copy of Civil 3D 2008 their way. They had not purchased software or any services but were calling into the tech support line fishing for free training. One gal called me and actually asked, "Yeah, I installed Civil 3D. Can you tell me how to use it?" I explained that a Civil 3D class is a three-day course but I gave her some resources to go to; help files, blogs and Autodesk tutorials.

A few weeks later, they decided they needed to see a test drive. Our test drives are basically hands-on demos that last about three hours. The sales person arranged a special demo just for this company - which is pretty unusual for us. At the beginning of the demo I clearly stated that the intention of the test drive is to familiarise clients with the capabilities of the software and introduce them to the interface. My favorite little line I use is, "This isn't even the tip of the iceberg. I'm just making you a sno-cone." While attempting to proceed through the exercises, they had a barrage of questions that clearly indicated they were already attempting to use it in production but were looking for free training. At this point I was annoyed- but remained professional and polite. I answered their questions - but prefaced each answer with, "In the training class we go into this topic in much more detail, but the answer to your question is..." We ended up going an hour past my usual time-frame. To this day they have not spent a penny.

Example 2:
In this example - I'm not sure who fired whom. He had a Land Desktop quote from a competitor and wanted a quote from us. I told the sales person we should not sell new Land Desktop seats and that we should explain why going to Civil 3D right off the bat would be better. [Note, the client is currently using base ACAD to produce subdivision plans.] So the sales person arranged a call and I explained what is happening with the product he wanted. The client was stubborn as a mule and full of misinformation about Civil 3D. The last demo he had seen was Civil 3D 2006. I explained that much has changed since then. The prospect said that he had seen a lot of sloppy engineering coming out of companies using Civil 3D. I said that the software is a tool, not a replacement engineer and that any sloppy user can produce sloppy results. He said, "I heard you need a full time CAD manager just to keep people running in Civil 3D." I said, "It is much easier to manage than Land Desktop or even base AutoCAD." He came up with a bunch more excuses, and said, "Well, if you don't want to sell me what I want, I'll go to [your competitor]." Frankly, I'm glad. If our competition wants to sell people the wrong tools just to make a buck - let them deal with a bull-headed client.

Example 3:
Lastly, there's the crass, incompetent "CAD manager." More like "CAD Mangler". His users are such sweet, nice dudes. The CAD manager likes to yell and intimidate - probably to mask the fact that he has no idea what he's doing. I was on-site with him just yesterday which is the inspiration for this post. When I was at their offices last year I migrated their custom MNU/MNL/MNS stuff to CUI and basically set up a bunch of network shared resources. Previous to my arrival yesterday the Mangler moved some files, which broke some tools. Since he didn't know his way around CAD setup, he basically copied the files over and over into different locations until things started working again. What was really going on was he got lucky and managed to copy files into a support file search path. Dumbass. Of course when I got there yesterday, the custom CUI "just stopped working." After many hours of beating it with my brain (and calling Russ to help) I finally concluded that the CUI file was corrupt and needed rebuilding. The Mangler demanded to know why it became corrupt - clearly *I* had done something to it when I built it last year. Of course none of the changes he made to the menus were the culprit - and the fact that he didn't make backups was somehow my fault too. He loudly proclaimed in his absurd Bronx accent, "I'm not happy dammit!" I left the office reassuring him that we would fix it as best we could via Webex after I had a chance to look at it.

I don't want to fire the whole company - but I want to somehow let the higher-ups know what an ignorant buffoon this guy is.

After doing some research in preparation for writing this post, I found some great articles for further reading on "Firing Clients"

How to do it. By Andrew Neitlich
When to do it. By Christopher Hawkens