General: Ordering from Adobe and how not to sell.

So during the CFUnited conference Adobe and organizers offered a special deal on ColdFusion to the attendees. I thought that this was a highly cool deal. Adobe supporting the very people that promote them every day.
I quickly chatted up the Adobe people at the conference on how to accomplish this as I did have a project requiring deployment of 23 CF servers. They all were consistent, which is good; I need to talk to the Eastern Sales Rep (Dominick Conte) whom I could not find in person or in attendance anywhere, which is bad, but whose business cards where everywhere ;o)
So, upon my return, I happily attempted to call Dominick. Different times, different dates; only voice mail answering. I thought the guy must be selling this stuff like hot-cakes as he never is available via phone; so I gave up and send an email to ask how one orders these hot deals offered by Adobe on the show.
His initial response was that I was not really at the show. Interesting, approach; made me doubt my very existence for about a little less than 0.1 ms... ahhh... deep thoughts. Of course, I advised him how he can find out who attended and then was waiting for some sort of contact.
Alas, again, no-go.
I am now paraphrasing the emails that went back and forth thereafter:

Me: "hey wassup", "why you not talk to me?", and "how can I order your good stuff?" and "why is it so difficult to talk to you guys?".
Dom: "Yeah, I tried to talk to you" (I checked and no such phone logs), and " what the h..k do you want anyways?"

This is not going well I think, as I am very consitently asking this man who is in sales on how to place an order (partners, direct or what?). So, he finaly caves and shoots back an email that he is not really the dude to talk to and the only way I can get this offer is to talk to a company in Canada.

WTH?


Cheers,
B.


Addendum:
We finally did end up buying some licenses for different projects from Adobe through the reseller in Canada. The credit for this goes entirely to Adam Lehman who could get me a contact name for ordering.

Cheers,
B.

CF: CfinNC North Carolina ColdFusion / Flex / Air Conference - Oct 17-18, 2009

I will be presenting at the CFinNC conference this October. I will share some insight into working with SOLR, the search engine based on Apache Lucene as well as talk about debugging tips and tricks. If you have some insight you would like to share feel free to leave a comment.



Here are the details on the conference:

Registration for CFinNC is now open! CFinNC is a free web development conference held in Raleigh, North Carolina during the weekend of October 17th and 18th with an International line-up of speakers presenting on timely and relevant topics on web development. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors and the creativity of the planning committee, registration for the event will be free and includes entry to the weekend event and to all presentations.

In order to keep the event free we have removed some hard costs and some benefits you normally get from paid-registration events.

Please be aware of the following:

1) You are responsible for paying for lunch for both days. We have enlisted the services of a local caterer and will be providing lunch each day for $10/day. This includes a sandwich, chips and drink. Please bring cash the day of the event! We will not be able to process credit cards!

2) Limited Edition, Collectible CFinNC conference t-shirts will be available for purchase for $15 with any proceeds going to offset costs and possibly sponsor a planning committee dinner (if we sell them all).

Lunch and shirt purchase is completely optional. You may indicate if you would like to purchase lunch and/or a t-shirt on the registration form.

For more information, please check the CFinNC website at: http://www.cfinnc.com


-Cheers,
Bilal