You’re a small software company. Of course, you’re innovative, adaptable and fast-paced! What other kind of small software company is there? You’re beginning to grow. You take the big step of hiring an experienced, professional sales person. And not just any old graduated-from-selling-cars salesperson. You’ve got one with an MBA, and with a solid track record of enterprise success. Why wouldn’t you? It’s time to stop playing sand-lot baseball and graduate to the big leagues!
The salesperson does his job, and has a major enterprise on the hook. They’ve seen your innovative product, and want it. They’ve talked to your existing customers and have decided you’re the real deal. You’ve agreed on a general pricing framework, which looks like a company-making gold mine to you, and a reasonable deal to the buyer. Now you’re getting down to resolving the final issues before sealing the deal.
No big surprise, your software isn’t a perfect match for their needs. How could it be? This will be your first enterprise customer! Everyone knows they have a unique set of needs! This is your chance to find out what they really are, meet them, and step up.
Your product road map gets pulled out. The buyer goes over it with a fine-toothed comb. They complain that it’s not terribly specific, the dates and targets are vague, and there’s little detail backing it up. And there are important things they need that are missing, without which they won’t be able to fully benefit from the wonderfulness of your product.
As you dive into the details, a gulf emerges between the way you are used to doing things and their expectations. You don’t have formal “market requirements documents” to assure that what you’re going to build takes into account the needs of the market and where it’s going. You don’t have formal “product requirements documents” of the kind they're used to seeing, with everything spelled out in advance and validated, so you’ll be sure that you build the right thing the right way the first time. This is too important to screw up! And if the enterprise customer is going to have to wait for what they really need, and commit to it before seeing it, they want to be absolutely sure they know what they’re going to get, when they’re going to get it, and how much it will cost. It could be a career-destroyer for the executives on the buyer’s side to set expectations, pay money, wait for months, and then have a belly-flop. If that’s what they wanted, they could just as well go to their own IT department, which has a proven track record of producing really big and painful belly-flops nearly every time. If we’re going to commit to some little, unproven company (they say), we want it locked down. We need to avoid failure here, don’t you see?
The proven salesperson who works for the little company assures his young compatriots that this is just how things are done. If you want to sell to these guys, there’s one answer. “Yes.” Time to grow up!
Many little software companies say “yes” at this point. Then they take the road to purgatory and march straight to hell, working as hard as humanly possible to meet the needs of their “gold-mine” customer not only as to substance, but just as importantly as to process.
When small, innovative software companies start to enjoy big success, many of them encounter this kind of opportunity, which is actually a serious obstacle. Who would think that the road to success goes through the valley of death for innovation?
My recently published book on Software Business and Product Strategy, deals with issues of this kind and many more. My books on Project Management and Wartime Software also address this issue.
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