General > General Technical Chat
Completely hopeless distributors these days
tooki:
--- Quote from: peter-h on July 10, 2021, 11:02:27 am ---I've done this with people working for me and it takes very little training. Basically you need somebody with a reasonable brain; they can learn different kinds of resistors in the same way as they could learn different kinds of screws if working for a fastener shop. It is just a willingness to learn a bit about the job one is doing. It makes life a lot more interesting, too. Most people hate their jobs these days and this is a way to make it a lot less tedious. Not a fashionable idea these days, I know :)
--- End quote ---
Anyone with enough brains to become competent at this is also smart enough to get bored with it, and WILL tire of it fairly quickly. You’ll get a few years out of them, tops.
You gotta understand that curiosity (an underlying feature of people who have a true “willingness to learn” and find life “interesting”) needs ongoing feeding. It is indeed easy to get such people up to speed, but they require real advancement (not just the hollow promises of it that so many employers give) and new challenges if you want to hold onto them. Sales does not offer this. (I know this firsthand.)
rsjsouza:
The type of service via phone where someone plows through a parts list for you is long gone; admittedly, it was much easier when you had 5~10 suppliers. Nowadays either you have a disty FAE that will do some of this for you or you do it yourself via their website - with the FAE, just keep in mind they will be balancing their suggestions across their various preferred suppliers, so everyone is kept happy in the supply chain.
For a five figure customer dealing with a corporate disty, the customer service team is indeed instructed to not waste their time with vague questions like these, especially from an out of the blue telephone call. However, a properly trained customer service agent would instead respond in a bit more useful way such as orienting you to navigate their website to search for what you need - but somehow I imagine this would not go down well with many folks ("I can browse the internet just fine, thank you very much!") with the ensuing disconnect tone.
Another aspect that seasoned customer service agents usually keep in mind is liability: I have seen folks being burned due to a single letter on the part number suffix that rendered the design inoperable or non-compliant in some way, therefore everything has to be put in writing with the information provided matching 1:1 to whatever they have on their database. You may think this is too stupid, but it does happen.
All in all, times have changed and the burden of specifying a part is left to the designer - it certainly erodes the value added of a disty but it surely scales much better.
Siwastaja:
But selecting a suitable resistor is not trivial. You are the designer, only you know what the design needs. A sales rep being an expert on all electronic components is a ridiculous requirement.
Yes, they could easily have 3-month crash course on basics so they could understand very basics like Ohm's law but then what? They would recommend you parts that are not suitable for your application anyway. At best, they would do the same as the parametric search already does.
No, it's best you as a designer know how to design, and sales reps as sales specialists know how to communicate to the manufacturers, how to negotiate prices, arrange shipping and so on. None of this requires EE expertise.
Vovk_Z:
--- Quote from: floobydust on July 09, 2021, 06:39:24 am ---Why aren't you telling them what part you want instead of asking what they have? Future has tons of 32.768kHz crystal offerings.
--- End quote ---
+1. Since some time several years ago, when I stated that there isn't now any EE-knowledgeable sale-person (that all are retired or else), and I started to have some experience - I started to find and say the exact part number as it is seen in that exact shop.
Siwastaja:
Seeing you don't have enough volume for serious discussions with manufacturers directly, have you tried asking for a quote from DK or Mouser, or have you just dismissed them as second-tier suppliers not suitable for mid volume manufacturing without even trying? I.e., what makes you think Future Electronics is significantly better for your volumes?
Designing very low cost (race to the bottom) products is hard and requires direct co-operation with manufacturers and careful control of the supply chain.
Are you sure you can't pay for the premium of Mouser/DK?
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