I have been using Dell for years now and have found their account management/sales teams to be a very strange beast. Not in a good way 😉

Every 6 months (sometimes much more often), I get an email from them saying “I am your new account manager please use me for your purchases of new hardware”. Once I managed to get 2 offers to manage the account in the same week, whilst another time, I had a conversation with a repair guy who offered to give me a discount if I ordered through him. The only reason I can see for this happening is that they must all be on some sort of commission.

Now luckily for Dell, I have had a few good account managers over the years (one of which I am convinced was actually in Finance) so I have been able to ignore these approaches without any major fallout. Still I am not convinced this is good practice for Dell – it must be irritating their customers.

The other fallout from this over eagerness to sell to me is something that I am sure marketing and sales teams the world over fight about:

Email.

Both departments have an obvious need to communicate directly to the customer base using email, but without communication and a level of understanding between the two, it is very easy to over communicate to your customer and even worse very easy to disenfranchise them.

Going back to Dell, this does not seem to be happening there. I get the standard Dell marketing emails telling me about offers available on the website as well as separate offers from the Dell account team. None are relevent to my requirements, and worse the amateurish nature of the emails from the Account Team looks like spam as they seem to have been copied and pasted out of a Word document.

The end result is that I rarely look at Dell emails today.