There are many reasons to dread sales calls with vendors (not just analytics vendors). You never know if the person on the other end of the phone is going to be receptive and actually listen to what you’re saying or if they’ll skip that and go for the hard sell.

Our experience with the folks at Visual Sciences, I’m pleased to say, has been nothing short of fantastic, and it all started with the first sales call. VS has done a tremendous job of requiring that their sales staff is primed and ready to go with the right answers and questions.

To make the first call as productive as possible here are some things you’ll want to gather beforehand:

• Average number of pageviews per month
• Average number of server calls (if you use Ajax> per month
• As much historical data on peaks and valleys in your traffic
• If you’re planning a commerce component, average number of transactions per month
• If you want to track rich media, total number of media assets
• Average number (and type) of external marketing campaigns (email, PPC, banner, etc)
• If you have Flash and want to track Flash events, number of SWF’s and some idea of what you’d like to track within the SWF’s

This should give you and your rep enough information to begin to talk about how the software will work with your infrastructure, as well as set the stage for pricing discussions later on.

Oh, and don’t be surprised if they tell you that HBX might not be the right fit for your organization. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. How many vendors are purely driven by sales and nothing else?

At the end of the day Visual Sciences is a sales driven organization, but that hasn’t stopped them from realizing that it’s in everyone’s best interest to part ways if their offering doesn’t fit the business objectives or budget. The “sales first, service later” approach did some major damage to the web analytics industry during the dot-com bubble years, but VS has recognized this and made sure that the fit is there before anything moves forward.