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by kjellsbells
764 days ago
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The thoughts in this article apply equally well to launching products inside a corporate as well. Sometimes a product team will "buy the business", eg offer credits or funding to a prospect in order to get their logo. This muddies up the entire experiment. Is the product worth X, or not? Does it solve a problem for customers that is worth X, or not? For b2b sales, selling 1 or 2 can also be exceptionally costly because you are on the hook for long term support: and if you bought the business, you are now underwater from day 1 with a customer who has you over a barrel. Worse, your sales force now think that every deal can be won on cost, and will start to show signs of deal fever. |
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It was incredibly damaging and would now be a red flag for me when looking at future workplaces.
It was a viscous cycle where the sales team promised all kinds of customisations to land deals. The software team would be lumped with the responsibility of delivering many of these while not getting time to refine the core products.
The software despite being critical for ultimately delivering also was still seen as a "cost centre" because on paper the credits were given away for pennies to land the "juicy" consultancy with it.
If any deal was tight, the sales team would just give away more software credits / promise more software customisation to land it.
The result was the consultant side of the business acted like they were responsible for all the revenue despite the software delivering a huge bulk.
On paper the software didn't bring in much because we had a sales team effectively giving away our software.
I've written previously about the dangers of courting a tiny fish from a big pond which is related. The one-sided nature of the emerging relationship where to the small supplier the contract means everything, but to the mega-corp it's actually just "that thing that Bob from Sub-division 3 uses" and doesn't actually have mind-share, because very little software is actually ever rolled out "org-wide". Mega-corps rarely behave in such a synchronised manner and chances are you're not really selling to "MegaCorp", you're just selling to Bob. And when he moves on, there's a good chance that no-one else has even heard of you. If you're lucky your invoices will still get paid for a while after despite no-one now even using your system, if unlucky you'll have to fight twice as hard now to get paid for the outstanding invoices, despite the undercut price you decided to charge Bob because you thought you were getting your foot in the door at MegaCorp.