You make a very good marketing point, which sometimes gets lost in the corporate stratosphere. Given how difficult it is for salesmen to get access to purchasing decision makers in companies, having awkward company policies is bad business.?

To give examples of behaviour that gets the sales at places I’ve worked at;

i) We had an Agilent sales rep. who spotted some HP microwave synthesisers looking unloved in the corner of one of our labs. He asked me about them. I said; “oh they just don’t power up and they’re pretty vintage”. “No problem", he said- "we get lots of trade-ins and we can probably find some power supplies for them” We sent them over to Agilent and back they came working and recalibrated at very reasonable cost.

ii) I was meeting with a Tek sales rep. who asked me about a Tek. multi-meter on my desk. “Came as a free gift with a recent Tek order", I said, "but failed after a few months".”That won’t do”, he said- "I’ll fix it”. He did, and posted it back to me about a week later.

iii) We had an old R&S microwave synthesizer that was dropping lock. We rang the sales office to arrange shipping and a repair. The same afternoon, I had a call from their sales rep. “I heard you needed a repair and I was in London, so I dropped by and collected the synthesizer.” And he brought it back, repaired, a few weeks later.

What each of these sales reps. was doing was building the relationship with their customers- all of them got 7 to 8 figure amounts of business from us.

With Keysight these days there is a good relationship with the technical divisions and a business-like relationship with the sales reps., but less close than before. I think Keysight's selling of many cheaper items through re-sellers is losing them valuable customer intelligence. The good news is that Keysight have a number of products which are simply the highest performance obtainable, I just wish they looked as stylish as their price tag.

Regards,

Alwyn