One way to dramatically lower sales costs

This in Business 2.0

"Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen, who's now working on a new company called Ning, captured the attitude of many startups when he said, "Ideally, we'll never meet any of our customers." After a customer located Ning's offices and dropped by for a visit, Andreessen said, the company took down the sign on its door."

The article later describes how Marc greeted another set of users with cupcakes.

Can you see an IBM or Oracle salesperson getting their expenses audited - green fees $ 200 ok, cupcake allowance more than $ 1.99 - sorry.  Maybe Gartner can learn from him how to reduce their 40% of revenues in sales and marketing cost?