Carl Tyler's Blog

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Some of you may remember that I was due to go to a VMware seminar last week, in return they would provide a free license of VMWare Workstation for attending. Well they kept their deal and they did indeed provide a free VMWare License key. Sadly this company needs to get some serious advice on their presentations, their demonstrations and their overall message. I considered the overall quality of the presentations and pitch very poor. If I didn't know what VMware was, I'm not sure this Seminar would have helped me to learn any more. Also their staff did something's that were just plain unprofessional, such as:

• Talking at the back of the room whilst a fellow employee was presenting
• Bringing their reference customers up to the front of the room whilst the person to introducing them who was sitting at the presenters desk was still integrating their slides into their presentation leading to all kinds of colour issues when the slides were displayed
• The demo movie didn't work
• Having people print out their own badges and bring them with them, whilst I can see the benefit of this for the organizer, it just comes across as really cheap

VMware is such a great product, and it can do so much that it could be demonstrated in a really cool, "holy cow how my life would be so much easier with this product" way and these guys and gals just didn't do that. As someone who is very critical of sales presentations and focus to message and being sure that the presentations always contain something of value to the potential customer I came really close to going up to the folks afterwards, shaking them and telling them how much they had screwed up. They had great attendance and just terrible terrible delivery.