>I suspect that the reason you don't understand selling is that you do most of your learning on your own. Once you've decided what to buy, you then shop for the lowest price.

I believe this is true. the part I'm still missing is this:

how can a person trust your average salesperson as a teacher?

I mean, most salespeople /openly snipe/ the competition, which in my mind brings laser focus on their bias. Also, I've never met a salesperson who knew as much as I do about hardware. It's pretty rare that I meet one who knows as much as i did when I was 14. I mean obviously, most of the time the sales person is talking to someone who doesn't know as much. But even so, when the guy is openly slagging the competition, even if you don't know anything about the actual product, wouldn't that make you just a little bit suspicious that the guy isn't working in your best interests?

Now, most of my salesguy experiences have been evaluating 'enterprise' products for companies I've worked or consulted for... when my company needs something, like you said, we figure out what it is we need on our own, then we call up the vendors involved (if it's the sort of product you can get a better deal calling in that buying from newegg or provantage) and figure out who has the lowest price. Now, sometimes we have a hard time getting people to talk to us, but especially if we have done business before, it's usually pretty quick and painless for both sides. the only real problem arises when it's a good that I don't know the approximate price range... I mean, I really only need a 2ghz chip, but if it's only another twenty bucks, i'll take the 2.2ghz... so if the part doesn't have enough public data for me to know about the price, I do waste some of their time trying to figure out the optimal price point.

But when I am experiencing real salesmanship, when, say, I'm evaluating two big-name brands of blade servers for a client[1] it seems like it's almost a battle between the sales folks trying to obfuscate facts and trick my client into acting against their interest, and me, trying to prove to my client that commodity hardware is commodity, and that when buying commodity hardware, you need to look at what is inside the box rather than the name on front. All the while the salesguys are handing out $50 amazon or starbucks gift certificates, or expensive booze to everyone they can get their hands on. I think the blade salesmen, after giving us all gift certs gave my boss a bottle of remmy; an unrelated sales team left a couple cases of beer in the ops room for us to share.

Over and over, I found the salespeople in blatant lies. Now, i don't know if they knew they were lying ahead of time, or if they didn't know, and they were just making things up that may or may not be true that might get the customer to buy. At one point they claimed that the 2.5" sas drives performed better than the 3.5" drives in most cases. I obtained datasheets from the manufactures in question, and was able to show the boss that the opposite was, in fact, true.

I guess my point is that the sales people knew very little about the products in question, and they were lying in obvious ways about the things they did know about.

[1]if you care, they are basically the same hardware, and the generation I was looking at was garbage because they used FBDIMMs. with the ram load my customer bought, a 1u pizza box with the same xeon CPU but with registered ecc ddr2 and the low power chipset used almost half as much power, and costs way less up front. Of course this was a few years back and all the hardware we evaluated is now thoroughly obsolete. None the less, blade servers do not always save you power.