Death Certificate

Death Certificate

Anyone in the competitive local IT sector will tell you how lucky you are if you are called up to do a ‘Proof of Concept’, or more commonly known as PoC.

For those who are not familiar with the term, it is a powerful opportunity to influence your potential Customer to select your proposed offering by proving that your theoretical IT solution will work in a real-world scenario.

In short a PoC opportunity indicates that you are more than half-way to winning.

Many IT vendors mark PoC down in red as THE DAY on their calendars, and scramble to assemble the best team to hold the best ‘live’ session ever for the Customer.

Unfortunately, sometimes the unfortunate can happen.

A little yellow bird spoke of an incident whereby a Key person of Vendor team had to call off the scheduled PoC. The reason (almost apologetically conveyed to the Customer) was that there was a death in the family, thus the request to postpone the PoC to a later date.

Of course it would be troublesome to arrange for it! Don’t they realize how privileged they are to even get this golden opportunity? A postponement – You can’t be serious?!? Wait a minute, perhaps this could be just a ploy to stall for more time??

So the most unfortunate happened – To grant a postponement, the vendor was asked to produce the Death Certificate to prove that the passing was not concocted.

IT BYTES BACK! says: So much for some show of empathy in this dog-bite-dog world. Or maybe, asking a Death Certificate could just be the Customer’s way of showing their ‘Proof of Concern’.