I have been in the boat of the company that ripped you off before. Sales will promise the world, product/engineering caves “just one last time” to help win the deal with the easiest shittiest thing. Years go by and things inexplicably break all the time.
It’s such an easy trap to fall into, because I hear similar stories all the time.
I guess the moral of the story is to assume sales is lying to you until proven otherwise? Haha not sure, just do as much research as you can but you’ll probably get burned anyway from time to time
> assume sales is lying to you until proven otherwise
Having dealt with enterprise sales countless times, yes they do and I yes I do presume so.
They lie in many ways, the most innocent one is by demoing unrealistic perfect scenarios without any corner cases, promising integrations that do not exist ("it's in the roadmap!") etc.
This is so standard it doesn't even deserve mentioning.
Why don't more companies mandate that their engineers talk to the company's engineers, alone, in an unrecorded room, before agreeing to buy?
I mean... talking to people with every incentive in the world to stretch the truth and/or little technical acumen doesn't sound like a recipe for success.
Isn't that a win for everyone except the sales rep though?
If the deal closes, Z% of the company ends up being tied up in trying to kludge Y into doing what was sold, spiking engineer burnout and lowering morale, and furthering a negative relationship with sales.
Plus you've now pissed off your new customer, by lying to them.
I worked for a FAANG where this was part of my job. I would often come into rooms and question why the client was spending money on a product that didn't appear to suit their needs.
This was incredibly effective, as it meant that the client actually trusted us when we said something would work.
That being said, I'd normally avoid calling our products crap (even when they were) and just push the client to use something that wasn't crap.
This only worked though, because we had a separate reporting line to sales, so any VP pressure had to go through our VP (which happened, but not as often as you'd think).
My understanding is that they changed this after I left, with predictable consequences.
That’s the problem, isn’t it: Sales is a short-term metric (quarterly?), whereas client retention is long-term (multi-year, depending on contract length).
I had the pleasure of carpooling with some random owner of a small tech firm, and he flat out said it was difficult to keep on top of salespersons.
Meaning they were pretty shifty by nature and hard to trust.
One of the worst times I had as a developer was when my direct supervisor was a salesperson, who put me on a project that she had sold, and she was also the PM on the project. I thought I was going to die.
You get in a room with Intel, you have to sign a waiver that gives Intel total property over everything discussed in that room. Even your own products, if you happen to mention something about them. No sensible company will let their Engineers in an Intel conference room, if they have any sense.
There's negative incentive for the selling company to do this. Too much of a risk that your prospective customer's engineers are just there for inspiration.
I’ve been on calls almost like this. What you get are solutions/sales engineers accompanied by sales. They’re all generally helpful, including the engineer to engineer conversations. I’ve even been in a position where a representative of a vendor worked directly with us for months, yet the same issues kept coming up ultimately leading to the project being scrapped. It’s a weird world where everyone is trying to sell something to everyone, I really don’t like it
It’s such an easy trap to fall into, because I hear similar stories all the time.
I guess the moral of the story is to assume sales is lying to you until proven otherwise? Haha not sure, just do as much research as you can but you’ll probably get burned anyway from time to time