RANT: Serif

[ravells]

lol, as much as the product is great, the sales department sucks. Big time. I remember once when I paid for an upgrade (I think it was to Drawplus X3) after one of their sales people called me on the telephone and said that as a loyal customer (I've been using their products for about 10 years now) I was entitled to a 'special discount' Three months later they were selling the full package for less than the upgrade (so much for the loyal customer status). I hit the roof, called them up and hurled abuse at them. They were very apologetic, sent me a bundle of free software and gave me a credit against my next purchase.

I find that haggling with them on the telephone does pay dividends. It ALWAYS follows the same pattern. I let the salesperson go through his script (I'm usually half listening and doing something else), I then ask a load of questions so salesperson is investing a lot of time into the sale (I know more about the product than they do anyway). I then say, it sounds really good, but......can't afford it, can you do better on the price? The salesperson says, 'let me talk to the manager' (if he does at all), and comes back with a reduced price.

Haggle like hell with them Rob / Gidde, you will get a discount.

P.S. One thing you might want to do is this:

If you go onto the Serif Forums: Here: http://forums.serif.com/

Go into the drawplus subforum (I'm a known face there) and say something like, after looking at ravell's maps (my Silverdale map is currently featured at Drawplus.com, which is their user gallery), I really wanted to use drawplus, we are the cartographer's guild etc etc. and then tell your story. I can endorse your post and then hopefully nice things might happen.