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My company is expanding into a new market area and we have been researching the use of a unique flash drive design for a large campaign. A month ago I contacted one of the leading developers of custom flash drive premiums and flash 'widget' software operating out of California, hoping to get detailed information on their customization capability and volume minimums. Since our proposed drive design and campaign are unique, I requested an NDA. Given that this company normally dealt in custom unit designs for national campaigns, this seemed a minor request. There was no objection to this at first, but then their sales representative fell silent, ignoring all email. After a long wait, I called the company to enquire as to what happened and was passed to their president. I could immediately tell something was wrong with this individual as he seemed rather distracted. I again asked about the NDA, to which there was no objection. But then I discovered the fellow had been Googling my company name while I was on the phone with him when he demanded to know why my email had no company domain name and why I had no web site -god forbid there should be such a thing as a company that works exclusively B2B and knows its small base of customers personally... The conversation immediately reverted into something akin to a police interrogation as to the legitimacy of my company. Over the next few days this escalated to the point where I actually had to submit a scan of my articles of incorporation to prove to this man's satisfaction that my company existed. I got an NDA at last -one drafted by them because my simple boilerplate one was unacceptable to their lawyers- but then after submitting my signed copy I was never able to get their signed copy in return. Another couple weeks later I was suddenly contacted again by the original marketing representative asking if I needed more assistance. I posed some more questions about their products and asked about this NDA. Again, silence.

It's now been a month and I'm still at square one. I've been trying to be very patient with these people because they obviously have quality products made in the US and I could find no other companies with comparable software capability. I would like to avoid spending 6 months and a lot of unnecessary expense on having such software custom-developed. But it's clear I've reached a cul-de-sac.

So I would like to pose the following questions to this community;

Is this common behavior for such companies, and if so, how can I tailor my communication to better cope with it and illicit more productive responses? I admit to having limited personal experience with such firms but do have enough business experience to know there are some regions of the country and some industries where the business culture is such that politeness engenders disdain. I've never been one to respond in kind -as much as I would like to sometimes...

Second, since I'm getting nowhere with this particular company, I would greatly appreciate any recommendations of companies that do custom flash drive production with widget software supporting such features as virtual paged catalogs, ROI use metrics tracking, background content updating and RSS content push and might be able to work with Flash platform development on more specialized applications.
Source-marketingprofs.com