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From experience, this is quite common in enterprise sales. Having been on both sides of such transactions, I’m now quite sceptical of features/functionalities u
by hectormalot 3y ago
From experience, this is quite common in enterprise sales. Having been on both sides of such transactions, I’m now quite sceptical of features/functionalities unless I can test drive myself. Some stuff I’ve seen:
- chatbot sales: “see how it recovers here because I misunderstood the question and gave a different answer than expected?”. (Demo was a linear path with this ‘recovery’ hard coded)
- Buy side: “yes absolutely we already integrate with X”. Queue 12 months of delays because they had never integrated with that platform before.
But, I think I get it. The deals are huge and you only sell a few a year. Once an enterprise commits, it is unlikely to switch vendors unless it goes really really bad. So, the salesperson that convincingly lies gets the deal, and surprisingly the downside is relatively limited.
OTOH, not massaging the truth might mean losing that deal. Huge downside, very limited upside. (Yes the buyer might be a bit more happy, but that likely doesn’t outweigh sometimes missing a multi million deal, unless buyer talk a lot with each other).
- wavemode 3y agoGuess it all depends on how you value your company's reputation versus short-term profits. I've personally worked on an API integration with such a company who delivered less than they'd promised. We certainly won't be building anything new in the future with their platform. And even this existing project will probably migrate away when feasible (though that, admittedly, will be quite a while from now, given how busy we are).