This is my home on the web. I founded Gradspot.com, recently launched DermTV.com, advise start-ups, program websites, and love few things in life more than building stuff. You can follow everything I do here on stuartschultz.com, or certain things on twitter, and other things on facebook.
I’ve been interested in buying a RAID or RAID-type backup storage device and have been researching Data Robotics’ Drobo and DroboPro. Since I’ve never setup a RAID or network accessible storage solution, I’ve been doing a lot of research. But no where was more helpful than Data Robotics itself. They have a dedicated line for pre-sales questions. Their help provided me with, over two calls (and even looping in an engineer), an hour of their time, and helped me figure out if (a) the Drobo was appropriate for me and (b) if so, how to setup my network. Assuming that they sell enough Drobos to support their pre-sales support, the move is genius and also clear a boon to any marketing and pr efforts (I’m writing an article about it, for free).
But taking a step back, I wonder what other types of businesses this can be and are applied to? Ultimately, I’m going to purchase a Drobo over two other solutions I was looking at because (i) I was able to get all of my questions answered about it (whereas for the others I had to hunt my answers down, sometimes unsuccessfully) and (ii) because it actually does fit my needs (which I was able to learn from the pre-sales help). Pre-sales support is certainly something to consider in any marketing, pr, and sales bag of tricks.
