| I've also worked at consultancies who let their software product strategy be effectively doomed by this. The sales team were always underselling the software (often just giving it away for free to land consultancy contracts); promising the moon to "large" companies because it looked amazing to get such a name on our homepage and looked good at the monthly company meeting. But the reality of large companies is that they are a many-headed beast, and just because you've sold some software to "BigCompany", doesn't actually mean much if you've actually just sold to the 4 person HR department of a local branch of a sub-division spin-off. That department leverages their "BigCo" name to get the world at a knock-down price, while the small company is throwing everything at chasing the promise of huge future revenues "when BigCo roll out fully" which never materialises, or happens in name only. Very often it turns out it's only ever "Dave" that had even heard of your small company / product and was just using it for some other BigCo political games. As soon as he leaves BigCo, because he leveraged "his HR transformation project" into a better job offer elsewhere, you struggle to even get a single person at BigCo to pick up the phone. To be fair, they'll happily keep paying your invoices for the contract, but remember you sold at a loss for the promise of future revenue which is now never coming. But hey, it's okay, because your own sales team have also moved on and are now promising that if you just rush in feature Y then we're sure to get a sale with MegaCorp. ( Repeat endlessly, to the stress of the rushed development team whose time has just been undersold again. ) |
Every weekly the sales team had the same bigcos "in the pipeline" as six months ago and they weren't replying to emails. But you have to help us get that SOW ready by tomorrow so we can send it to them.