Part 4: The Rubber Chicken as Market Research Device
I spoke at the Air Force IT Conference in
Montgomery, Alabama some time after the HP event, and Ed Enzman, one of our federal sales guys, and I manned the NetPro booth on the vendor show floor. We had given away maybe five or six chickens during the morning, and by luch time there was a line of twenty or thirty people at our booth. Did they want to ask me question about my session? No. Did they want to find out more about DirectoryAnalyzer? Not a chance. Did they even know what Active Directory was? They had no clue. All they wanted was one of the damn chickens. It didn't take us long to figure out that these people were definitely NOT prospects for NetPro products. But we had something they wanted, and ever the intrepid salesmen, Ed and I figured that if we had something they wanted, perhaps they had something we wanted. So as each person came up to ask for a chicken, we gave them a task. Sometimes it was just to pick up some cool swag from another vendor. And sometimes we asked them to get product information from our competitors like NetIQ and Quest. And one person we asked to pose as a "potential customer" and get competitive and pricing information from NetIQ. Behold the Power of the Chicken!