Previously, in my HostingCon Day 1 post, I mentioned an exchange in which someone didn’t bother to engage me on their product despite my having rolled out the red carpet for a sale. In my naiveté, I just assumed he sucked as a salesman.

Later on, a friend that read the post mentioned that it was likely due to the fact that I was a woman. Had I been a man and looked like I had money to spend or authority to approve purchases, the conversation likely would have gone much different.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that my friend was likely right.

Ironically, this week I got an email from the company he represented. Someone had noticed that I had an account, shared my information, and didn’t buy anything (apparently this is something they notice when not at HostingCon, but when told this at HostingCon it is not a cause for attention). A cut and paste of the email with some identifying info snipped follows:

Hello,
My name is ******, I work for [Company] and noticed that you signed up for  [Product], but have not added any servers. With [Product] you can:

[snip exciting features]

Is there anything I can do to help get you started? If you have lost your log in information please let me know and would be happy to forward it on to you.

Well, he did ask if he could help.

Actually, funny you should write.

I was at HostingCon and wound up by one of your folks during the
******* party. I leaned in, and saw his [Company] shirt, and the
conversation went as follows:

Me: Oh, you’re from [Company]!
Whoever: Yep, I am.
Me: Interesting. You guys have the [Product], right?
Whoever: Yep.
Me: What a coincidence, I actually signed up for that – but I haven’t
actually bought anything from you guys yet.
Whoever: That’s cool. [walks away]

It was the gentleman with the ****** haircut, somewhat *******. He had
wandered over to a crowd with *******, *********, ********.

Not sure if it was due to the fact that I was a female so he couldn’t
conceive I had money to spend (or couldn’t possibly be the decision
maker in my company) or that I didn’t look like a booth babe therefore
it was not worth his time when blondes in hot pants were plentiful,
but the fact that I laid out the red carpet to have a discussion on
your product and he wound up walking away without any kind of
engagement did wind up leaving a bit of a poor impression with regards
to your company. It was HostingCon – I didn’t anticipate having to
chase vendors down (and, well, I didn’t).

So, from that, I decided not to do business with [Company] to move
into the server/VPS market. I did get a fun blog post out of it,
though. It really does, sometimes, just take one bad experience,
folks.

I do wish you good luck in the future, though, and again, thanks for the email.

To be fair, he offered an apology on behalf of the company, credit, and stated that it was “definitely not something we see in our employees”, but my guess is he doesn’t see it because most people in hosting are men and men don’t tend to notice this crap.

It’s almost like the cat and dog thing, you know what I’m talking about? How some people always call cats “she” and dogs “he”. Some people always assume the techs and sys admins are “he” and the designers and billing and HR people are “she”.

And some people at a HostingCon party can’t conceive that the house-wifey looking, short, overweight, almost 40 chick could possibly come up with $30,000+ a year in business to a data center, therefore the initial impression was to blow me off.  Of course, had I been an overweight, short, almost 40 year old man, I have a feeling the conversation would have gone much different and that business potential would not have been so hard to believe.

It’s annoying.

Lydia Leong from Gartner, who gave the fabulous opening keynote, wrote a great blog post on Booth Babes. I, too, was kind of amused at the booth babes, especially with the level of blankness that came out of some of their mouths regarding the products they were there to promote. (Not that all these women were dumb – some of them were exceedingly beautiful and smart – just not about what they were supposed to be selling or even what specific industry their product was in reference to).

I dunno whether I care about the Booth Babes. Anything that can get anyone a job that easy in this job market is something I probably should be impressed by, and I’m an Austinite, so I guess I should thank them for helping out our local economy by employing our locals to stand around in hot pants and boy shorts.

But when your inability to comprehend that there are women in this industry and, more important, that there are women that write checks, make vendor decisions, can gut servers, and may even be able to out-CLI your ass during a crash, you have a problem.

I know, I know… I keep blogging, no one’s gonna invite me to anything next year.