"Our teams need to get in the habit of meeting with clients, staff, potential hires, and each other by phone, or in an office, without a dinner, lunch or drinks. Sales can be generated without a meal."
Yup....this is where we are.
13 replies (most recent on top)
Consultants are leeches just like sales people. They should just pickup the telephone and call customers.
How can I be a consultant when I'm not allowed to meet a customer? I get the feeling that we're all part of the largest asset stripping operation in corporate history.
And apparently due to the lack of merit increases , they don’t us to eat either .
Starting to feel more like Ben Hur in the galley.
From here on end , I will be referred to as 41
Hey, I don't know about you all but we have major Skype outages for DXC on this account. Clients seem to be fine most times though. Maybe they can fix the c-ap they do to our machines and Skype?
Meanwhile, back at the Stock Exchange.......
Watching Mikey and the management team to save on travel and use Skype for their time wasting meetings. No more meals allowed for them either which means no more steak to be cut up.
Maybe now there wont be trips for Build - a - tron and all bullc-ap stuff. DXC is a "Digital" company , so use "Digital" products to meet. Heck we have FaceTime on phones, Tele-conference been around for years, Skype, WebEx .
Problem is you can't cut steak remotely #ISeeDXC
These days 'drinks' and 'dinners' could be construed as gratuities needing to be declared, less you be accused of influencing clients or suppliers under some ethical policy or some such nonesense.
My bugbear when at DXC wasn't meals or drinks...erm, apart from trying to get breakfast and dinner in a capital city with the amount they allow or being denied the price of a coffee on a claim for a 5hr drive because praque said it was not a 'recogonised meal'. No, what got me was being denied travel to go and visit a client to sort out a complex problem. It is so much easier to do f-2-f than beggar about on skype with all that: "Can you hear me now...? wait, you sound like a Dalek"
I would say initial meetings with clients are very important. You can do the phone calls after that. But first meeting has to be f-2-f as it tells the client you care about their problems enough to go and visit them at their offices. Otherwise you look cold, cheap and uncaring, which I suppose is the what the black and white brand is all about now.
My new employer received praise from the client because I took a few hours out to drive an hour up the road to sort out their worries. They also told me a few 'between these four walls' and it so happened I knew people in my firm who could help the client sort those problems, so I put them in touch with each other and we got another assignment out of it. Yes, it cost me 2hrs out of my budget which I had to recover, but it meant we got another chargeable assignment and a client feeling they can pick up the phone now. Its just about building that initial relationship that I think DXC miss out on.
This is actually a step forward, it wasn’t that long ago where here in the UK you had to get three levels of sign off to pay a £25 train fare to travel to London to have client meetings! The trimmings of lunch and drink have long gone!
This is nothing new. The crucial difference is that now it has been made official. Long before that, you had to pay out of your own pocket and hope it would be reimbursed. Right now, any sort of team activity requires you to contribute out of your own pocket. Screw that. I'd rather spend my Friday afternoon with friends and drinks.
So there will be no steaks to cut?
Toxic company
They will be asking us to pay for our own consumables, pens, paper and bog roll next, oh wait......
Still as long as the Shareholders are happy eh, oh wait....