The most important part of selling a product: having a product
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We just finished the first monthly all-hands meeting of our startup. 15 people from 3 different countries, over Skype.
Predictably, half of the meeting was dealing with Skype issues.
The other half...
CEO: "We'll be introducing a brand new service, so I want you sales people to start calling from tomorrow, and let's see at least 50 clients by the end of November. 100 would be great!"
Accountant: We'll need to set up payment forms... blah blah blah...
... (Other businessy people planning their stuff. My boss, head of IT, remains silent) ...
CEO: Ok, so everything is set. Meeting adjourned.
... (Me and boss remain in room) ...
Me: Boss.... how long has this pivot been in the works?
Boss: First time I hear of it.
Me: You are aware we don't have the software for this new plan of hers?
Boss: I know.
Me: And that the software we do have is a pile of garbage Wordpress hack, put together over a few days, as a demonstration of what we might make for real?
Boss: Yes.
Me: And she is launching it right now. Today. Salespeople are already making calls.
Boss: Yes.
Me: So the main focus of the entire company over the next two months will be selling the product we don't have, that we haven't even started planning yet, and that needs to be available RIGHT NOW.
Boss: Yes.
Me: ....
So now I'm planning a quick wordpress replacement thing to be shat out over the next week. Hope salespeople aren't too successful.
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@cartman82 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
a quick wordpress replacement thing
That's the oddest euphemism for a resume I've ever heard...
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@izzion said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
a resume
That's what comes after a suspend…
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@cartman82 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Me: You are aware we don't have the software for this new plan of hers?
Boss: I know.
Me: And that the software we do have is a pile of garbage Wordpress hack, put together over a few days, as a demonstration of what we might make for real?
Boss: Yes.
Me: And she is launching it right now. Today. Salespeople are already making calls.
I see in my crystal ball that "she" came up from Marketing. Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
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@da-Doctah said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
Marketing only see the surface. If you're doing a demo with Marketing involved, make sure it is obviously still a demo, probably by putting a flashing “
THIS IS A DEMO!” in the middle of the screen.
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@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@da-Doctah said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
Marketing only see the surface. If you're doing a demo with Marketing involved, make sure it is obviously still a demo, probably by putting a flashing “
THIS IS A DEMO!” in the middle of the screen."Hey, can you remove the THIS IS A DEMO text? I have someone who wants to buy this but they don't like that part."
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@mott555 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Hey, can you remove the THIS IS A DEMO text? I have someone who wants to buy this but they don't like that part."
“All in good time. We need to convert what's there from being a Hollywood western set to an actual town.”
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@da-Doctah said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
I see in my crystal ball that "she" came up from Marketing. Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
Bingo.
My boss isn't helping matters by not being clear with these people what we DO have and what we DON'T.
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The most important part of selling a product: having a product
orly? The "Kickstarter" thread is
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@dkf marketing will sell lies with PowerPoint presentations and tell you to code it in a rush
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The CEO is now all-caps yelling at me about deadlines.
That's great news! Means she's excited about our progress!
Right guys?
Right?
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I had a guy from sales flat out say to me "we sell the customer a vision, not actual products. Nobody would buy these."
I said "we make products that may directly affect a patient's health. How for you live with the above philosophy given our ethical responsibility as a company?"
He then tried to buy me a coffee like that fixes things.
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Didn't this tactic work well for Bill Gates?
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@cartman82 I prefer the all-caps to the lowercase 'i's :shudder.
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@coldandtired said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@cartman82 I prefer the all-caps to the lowercase 'i's :shudder.
HOW ABOUT TYPiNG LiKE THiS? THE HOMESTAR RUNNER WAY!
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@ben_lubar I'm all for it. It lets me know incredibly quickly that I can safely ignore that person forever and nothing of value will be lost :)
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CEO finally gave me the price list they are sending out to customers. It's 5 pages of line items, including social media services, VR-related things and white label options.
We can support almost none of it.
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@cartman82 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
We can support almost none of it.
So, links to their Facebook page work, then?
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@ben_lubar said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@coldandtired said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@cartman82 I prefer the all-caps to the lowercase 'i's :shudder.
HOW ABOUT TYPiNG LiKE THiS? THE HOMESTAR RUNNER WAY!
uPvOtE tHiS iF u aGreE^^^
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@bb36e iT lOoKs LiKe yOu ArE uSiNg StUdLeY cApS tHeRe!
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The day my CEO gives me an email in all caps is the day i hand in my resignation.
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@da-Doctah said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
Reminds me of
https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/10550/click-on-this-mock-picture-of-a-button-in-powerpoint-and-show-me-what-it-doesWhich in turn reminds me of
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@anonymous234 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Reminds me of
Isn't that one of the threads where @▓▚▚▛▚ doxed himself?
Filed under: Probably shouldn't have said that...
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@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@da-Doctah said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Marketing people are constitutionally unable to understand the concept of "just a demo".
Marketing only see the surface. If you're doing a demo with Marketing involved, make sure it is obviously still a demo, probably by putting a flashing “
THIS IS A DEMO!” in the middle of the screen.Late coming back to this. It must also break visibly on certain things. Otherwise, as suggested, you'll just get asked to remove the flashing demo words. And the fake data it displays must be visibly and obviously fake, and must not change as you show features (you demo adding an item and the new item is not visible, and you demo removing an item and the item does not disappear). And as you talk about it you must begin every sentence with "When the feature is finished, ..." to convey as much as possible the fact that the feature is not finished.
None of this will help, except that you can (truthfully) say that you told them repeatedly that the feature is not in a sales-ready condition.
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[going back to our office, just after a meeting with a client]
Me: You promised them features A and B!!!
Boss: Yes, it seems they really want them.
Me: But they are mutually exclusive!
Boss: Yes.
Me: ... I mean.. it's impossible to implement them both. Impossible!
Boss: Yes.
Me: WTF!?!?
Boss: It's more than two months till delivery date. They'll forget about it.And you know what? He was right.
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@Steve_The_Cynic This is going to sound really idealist, but as long as you're in condition to find a new job, I don't think you should do anything of that.
Your job is to produce a reasonable demo and estimate for how long it will take to make, and if others don't want to do their job, it's their own damn problem. Marketing people ARE able to understand what a demo is and how long it takes to complete a product, they're just choosing not to because they know they'll get away with their bullshit.
It's one thing to tolerate some stupidity from higher ups or coworker, no company is perfect, but when it gets to the point that they're literally acting like 5 year old children, that's when you should at least start sending some angry messages to their superiors.
Of course, if the chain of incompetence goes all the way to the top, that's when you're truly fucked. But then again, the entire company is, it's just a matter of time. And remember that the chain ends at the shareholders, the CEO is still an employee.
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@Helix said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
The day my CEO gives me an email in all caps is the day i hand in my resignation.
At my previous job, my boss was often sending me emails written in all caps.
After explaining to her what it means, she kept doing it.
One day, I saw her laptop unlocked while she was gone for lunch.
I took the opportunity to disable her CAPS_LOCK
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@anonymous234 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Reminds me of
Isn't that one of the threads where @▓▚▚▛▚ doxed himself?
Filed under: Probably shouldn't have said that...
I can't get that QR code to scan.
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@anotherusername said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@anonymous234 said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Reminds me of
Isn't that one of the threads where @▓▚▚▛▚ doxed himself?
Filed under: Probably shouldn't have said that...
I can't get that QR code to scan.
It was a postal code, most QR-Code scanners don't detect those.
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@TimeBandit said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
At my previous job, my boss was often sending me emails written in all caps.
One previous boss wrote emails with subjects such as "!!!!IMPORTANT!!! $$$stuff and things$$$" (with the "stuff and things" part being the real subject of the email, albeit formulated in vague terms such as "new release" or "that code you sent me").
Weirdly, he never understood why many of his emails ended up in our spam folders and he had to resend them (yes, we could have configured the spam filter to accept his emails... but where's the fun in that?).
Although there may or may not have been times when we pretended to not have received an email from him thanks to that excuse...
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In my first programming job, my boss would send me emails where the subject was the entire question and the body was blank
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@Jaloopa I greatly prefer these to mails with useless subjects like "question", which inevitable evolve into "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: question".
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@ScienceCat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
"Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: question".
You need some bonus Germans in there: "Re: Aw: Re: Re: Aw: Re: Aw: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: Aw: Fw: Re: Re: question"
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@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
In my first programming job, my boss would send me emails where the subject was the entire question and the body was blank
If the message is short, it makes sense. It has the advantage that the question is immediately visible in the message list and I don't really see any problem with it.
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@dkf well thanks. I tried to escape these particular memories...
Bonus points if there are also some � in it, because you have Asians in your team.
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@ScienceCat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Jaloopa I greatly prefer these to mails with useless subjects like "question", which inevitable evolve into "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: Fw: Re: Re: question".
I also have a weird dislike for any email whose subject ends in "(EOM)", with a blank body.
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@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You need some bonus Germans in there: "Tr: Re: Aw: Re: Re: Aw: Re: Aw: Re: Re: Fw: Tr: Re: Re: Aw: Fw: Re: Re: question"
You also forgot the French colleague
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@Jaloopa said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
In my first programming job, my boss would send me emails where the subject was the entire question and the body was blank
Pfft. I remember a job where the email system was on Lotus Notes (of the 1998-compatible variety), and the company chef (yes) would send multi-paragraph emails contained entirely in the subject lines, because that was possible and she was technology-impaired.
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@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
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@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
I suspect @Luhmann's French colleagues were actually Wallonian.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
And the fake data it displays must be visibly and obviously fake
Our testing database at work contains clients such as John Q. Citizen and Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
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@PleegWat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
I suspect @Luhmann's French
colleaguescustomers were actually Wallonian.
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@Steve_The_Cynic said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Pfft. I remember a job where the email system was on Lotus Notes (of the 1998-compatible variety), and the company chef (yes) would send multi-paragraph emails contained entirely in the subject lines, because that was possible and she was technology-impaired.
The FWP thread is
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@masonwheeler said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
John Q. Citizen and Fred and Wilma Flintstone.
Test Kees who is obviously from the Netherlands
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@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
Test Kees who is obviously from the Netherlands
Best test customer name (in french) : Yvon Payé (meaning "They will pay")
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@TimeBandit I've put in a load of quotes for Mr Testy McTestface in our QAT and UAT systems
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I really wish this were the first time I've read stories like this... sadly they are far too common.
I lived this experience for over four years in a previous job where we'd promise non existent products to investors and customers and get burned for it repeatedly before the company finally folded. If it weren't due to the founder just being a capital D dumbass I'd have thought was running a Ponzi scheme but he was took stupid to pull something like that off. He just had no clue how to run a business.
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@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
The '"Tr" in the example is for "Transfert" = Forwarded. "Re" is for "Réponse" (response/reply/answer) with the accent flattened.
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@PleegWat said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@dkf said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
@Luhmann said in The most important part of selling a product: having a product:
You also forgot the French colleague
I've had the good fortune to only have ones who use “Re:” (which since it's a Latin-derived term is presumably not too objectionable to them).
I suspect @Luhmann's French colleagues were actually Wallonian.
"Walloons"
