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I'm working with a particular customer prospect, "V", to sell them one of our flagship products. V is using the free, open source version of that product today. V came to us asking for "dashboarding" to help them understand all their problems: when, why, and how often infrastructure and automated processes are failing.
As I first reviewed this opportunity with the account executive, "Calvin", I warned that dashboarding is not our product's strong suit. Most of the specific capabilities V requested are not in our product. I cautioned Cal that if we simply answered their questions repeating their language back to them the answers would be "No, no, no, just a little bit, and no." Going down a list of requested features and saying No to most of them is obviously not how to win a sale. Thus we would need to determine the nature of V's underlying problems and seek to align it to what our product does do.
The first meeting with Customer V went well. I quickly discovered that their underlying problems are exactly the ones we address: scalability, use of Kubernetes infrastructure, and management of environment configuration at scale. V even agreed that solving these problems was the real goal. "Dashboarding" was what their implementation-focused people talked about because they were thinking very short term. They wanted detailed instrumentation to analyze the frequent failures in the hodge-podge, DIY system they'd built instead of thinking about replacing it with a robust commercial system has already solved those problems.
Our second meeting with Customer V went well, too... up until the end when Cal wrapped it up by going back to the terminology in their email from weeks earlier and asking, "So, you said the most important thing to you is dashboarding. Did you see enough dashboarding? Will this solve your dashboarding needs?" Seriously, Cal was repeating dashboarding like a toddler who's learned a bad word and seen that it gets a reaction out of his parents. I kicked him under the virtual table— i.e., I furiously typed messages to him in Slack— asking him not to use that word. ...Not because, like with the toddler analogy it's a bad word, but because it's an inaccurate way of framing what our product does that will block the sale.
Customer V went dark on us for a few weeks after our last meeting. Cal and I discussed this morning about reaching out to them again. As we reviewed our previous call notes, I repeated my admonishment to Cal that we need to reframe the argument for buying our product away from "dashboarding". I reminded him that a) we don't have dashboards, and b) their real problems are scalability and management, which we do solve. Thus we ought to frame it as, "We solve scalability and management for you." In professional realm of enterprise software sales this is not hard stuff.
Cal sends out an email to Customer V at lunchtime today. Guess what he does.... Yup, the whole email is about "dashboarding". FFS! Has he listened to anything I've said on the topic, even as recently as this morning? Is he trying to lose the sale here?
I'm split on which of two approaches to take with Cal and his idiotic behavior at this point:
1) Confront Cal using very direct language. "Cal, I've told you multiple times, as recently as this morning, that we need to reframe the problem with Customer V. Are you interested in winning this deal? Because the way you're ignoring me you're going to lose it. And I'm prepared to be clear with Management that you've repeatedly agreed to a plan with me then gone and done the opposite."
2) Malicious compliance. Rather than fight Cal, show him what happens when we do it his way: Reaffirm the customer's and his language that this is all about dashboarding. Show them the one, small dashboarding feature we have. Answer their questions about it truthfully so they see it's a weaksauce feature. Answer their other dashboarding questions directly with "No, we don't do that," multiple times. Likely result: Customer V says, "We're not interested then," and I can stop having conversations with a brick wall named Cal.
As I first reviewed this opportunity with the account executive, "Calvin", I warned that dashboarding is not our product's strong suit. Most of the specific capabilities V requested are not in our product. I cautioned Cal that if we simply answered their questions repeating their language back to them the answers would be "No, no, no, just a little bit, and no." Going down a list of requested features and saying No to most of them is obviously not how to win a sale. Thus we would need to determine the nature of V's underlying problems and seek to align it to what our product does do.
The first meeting with Customer V went well. I quickly discovered that their underlying problems are exactly the ones we address: scalability, use of Kubernetes infrastructure, and management of environment configuration at scale. V even agreed that solving these problems was the real goal. "Dashboarding" was what their implementation-focused people talked about because they were thinking very short term. They wanted detailed instrumentation to analyze the frequent failures in the hodge-podge, DIY system they'd built instead of thinking about replacing it with a robust commercial system has already solved those problems.
Our second meeting with Customer V went well, too... up until the end when Cal wrapped it up by going back to the terminology in their email from weeks earlier and asking, "So, you said the most important thing to you is dashboarding. Did you see enough dashboarding? Will this solve your dashboarding needs?" Seriously, Cal was repeating dashboarding like a toddler who's learned a bad word and seen that it gets a reaction out of his parents. I kicked him under the virtual table— i.e., I furiously typed messages to him in Slack— asking him not to use that word. ...Not because, like with the toddler analogy it's a bad word, but because it's an inaccurate way of framing what our product does that will block the sale.
Customer V went dark on us for a few weeks after our last meeting. Cal and I discussed this morning about reaching out to them again. As we reviewed our previous call notes, I repeated my admonishment to Cal that we need to reframe the argument for buying our product away from "dashboarding". I reminded him that a) we don't have dashboards, and b) their real problems are scalability and management, which we do solve. Thus we ought to frame it as, "We solve scalability and management for you." In professional realm of enterprise software sales this is not hard stuff.
Cal sends out an email to Customer V at lunchtime today. Guess what he does.... Yup, the whole email is about "dashboarding". FFS! Has he listened to anything I've said on the topic, even as recently as this morning? Is he trying to lose the sale here?
I'm split on which of two approaches to take with Cal and his idiotic behavior at this point:
1) Confront Cal using very direct language. "Cal, I've told you multiple times, as recently as this morning, that we need to reframe the problem with Customer V. Are you interested in winning this deal? Because the way you're ignoring me you're going to lose it. And I'm prepared to be clear with Management that you've repeatedly agreed to a plan with me then gone and done the opposite."
2) Malicious compliance. Rather than fight Cal, show him what happens when we do it his way: Reaffirm the customer's and his language that this is all about dashboarding. Show them the one, small dashboarding feature we have. Answer their questions about it truthfully so they see it's a weaksauce feature. Answer their other dashboarding questions directly with "No, we don't do that," multiple times. Likely result: Customer V says, "We're not interested then," and I can stop having conversations with a brick wall named Cal.
