At first blush, I was offended by this post. But, I thought I must be misreading it somehow. I decided to sleep on it. (I don’t care how flat a flatscreen monitor is, but it sure makes a mattress lumpy. ;^))

Let me ask a clarifying question.

Are you saying “Don’t go to a prospect and ask a bunch of questions to understand his business?” or are you saying “Don’t go to a prospect and ask a bunch of questions without a list of solutions that you can immediately offer?”?

-Ken

Microsoft’s Business Assement Toolkit has a lot of open-ended questions that will get the business owner to stop and think about what he or she really wants in an IT consultant. Many times you can make a great impression on someone if you ask good questions. At first, it is more about making sure that this business is the right fit for you. Is this somebody you can/want to do business with? Asking questions and listening carefully is the best way to find out.

“They look at IT as an expense, they do not like dealing with computer problems and you’re there to make that problem go away.”

That’s correct. Business people do not consider anyone other than other business people to be worth talking to or to be worth their time. Business people consider themselves to be better than everyone else except othet business people. To them, technical people are nothing more than tools to get something fixed with. Like a hammer or a screwdriver. Once the problem is fixed the tool goes back into the toolbox and they don’t want to see it again unless the tool is needed in the future to fix another problem. Ace Hardware had a print advertisement a couple of years ago that showed an Ace Hardware employee hanging on a tool pegboard. That’s exactly the way I feel as a professional computer person. Business people only take you off the rack when your needed and then put you back on when your not.

This is a sad situation. And I think a lot of the problem is with business schools. I think the business schools are instilling this kind of thinking into business students. If business people only realized that a partnership with technical people instead of an adversarial relationship with them was beneficial to them things would be a lot better for us. We would get the pay and respect we deserve.

It wasn’t always this way. Back when there were only mainframes and minicomputers business people had to have respect for the techs because they had no choice. There were only a handful of people that knew how to run those machines and there was only 1 machine per company. The company was totally dependent on that 1 machine and the guy that knew how to run it. So they were forced to have respect even though they didn’t want to.

Now with every Tom, Dick and Jerry claiming to be a computer expert, business people look at us as being a “dime a dozen” as you said. We are nothing more than a ‘commodity to be bought and sold’ as Mark Hamill said in Corvette Summer.

I couldn’t agree with you more about this stuff…
http://techsoeasy.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!AB2725BC5698FCB8!183.entry

But I don’t agree with these darn Live Spaces URL’s with !’s in them. They never copy correctly.

This is the correct link: http://sbsurl.com/rolodex