[dkyc]

I think this is meant in another way: sales and marketing should never discuss future features with potential customers. Meaning, they should not try to win deals by promising features not yet rolled out, rather than not being involved in internal priorization discussions.

I happen to agree with the author to an extent. Selling future things rather than what's presently available makes sales a lot easier (which is why reps are often eager to do it), but the true value is created when sales sells what is already there. My father always put it this way: You have to sell what you have.

[ukulele]

This approach is cutting off a major strategic artery. Sales & marketing can do much more than just pushing what they're given; they should be a valuable pulse on the customer, and the truest feedback you can get for an upcoming feature is whether or not someone will pay you for it.

Particularly for larger or more advanced features, it makes much more sense to run engineering partly in parallel with sales & marketing (with feedback between the two) rather than in serial. Product and innovation cycles in the company are much tighter that way, and more accurate.

[isostatic]

Sure, but the conversation should be

Customer: "We want your product to do $FEATURE, there's nothing else that does it / other products that do it have these problems" Sales: "Thanks, we'll have a look at that and see if it's possible in the future"

or

When many customers want $FEATURE, it's something to consider

What shouldn't happen is

Sales: "Buy this product, it's great, and in the future it will have $FEATURE" Customer: "Great, we want $FEATURE, when will it be ready"

[daurnimator]

Contrarily, large customers often want to know what your roadmap is like: they want to be assured that your company/product is moving in the same direction that they are. Sales and marketing solve this by mentioning things in the pipeline. Without knowledge of what's coming up you'll fail to close a huge number of deals.

[dagw]

I guess it depends a lot on what kind of software you're selling. I used to work at a place that did very niche enterprise products, and if we got 10 new customers in a year that was a really great year. For a large enough potential contract we'd add almost whatever you asked for.