The overly commercial approach by the GCP rep is so short sighted but not uncommon.
I recently worked on a project which had a potential vendor spend in the millions if not tens of millions when it went to production and scaled.
Without exception, all of the vendors we spoke with early doors were horrible. Only interested in qualifying the size of the opportunity and when it would sign, not giving us access to the right people and playing horrible politics with our client.
I won't list them all, but the worst of the bunch was Snowflake. They were a nightmare and completely shot themselves in the foot.
If these vendors would have just helped like a partner with even a medium term focus, any one of them could have signed an enormous deal within a year.
Instead, we ended up going open source and AWS native, just because they are so much easier to deal with than many other vendors.
Having ran an AWS partner and seen them up close hundreds of times, I agree they are generally very nice and easy to deal with. I did see a recent cultural change when I had a problem in my own startup, but suspect they are still nice to the big boys.
The only reason that I can think of as to why you would want to talk to a sales rep (because you don’t actually need to to use cloud services) is to try and wrangle some sort of discount.
But the sales rep knows that their job isn’t strictly needed, because the customer can sign up and use services without talking to anyone. They only exist to upsell services.
There’s almost no intersection between what a customer wants and what the salesperson provides, so why wouldn’t it be a bad experience for everyone?
I recently worked on a project which had a potential vendor spend in the millions if not tens of millions when it went to production and scaled.
Without exception, all of the vendors we spoke with early doors were horrible. Only interested in qualifying the size of the opportunity and when it would sign, not giving us access to the right people and playing horrible politics with our client.
I won't list them all, but the worst of the bunch was Snowflake. They were a nightmare and completely shot themselves in the foot.
If these vendors would have just helped like a partner with even a medium term focus, any one of them could have signed an enormous deal within a year.
Instead, we ended up going open source and AWS native, just because they are so much easier to deal with than many other vendors.
Having ran an AWS partner and seen them up close hundreds of times, I agree they are generally very nice and easy to deal with. I did see a recent cultural change when I had a problem in my own startup, but suspect they are still nice to the big boys.