What. How is this even remotely acceptable? If discovered it destroys your credibility. Among your employees it destroys your credibility. If I was an employee and found out that this was happening, I'd be extremely upset. I wouldn't trust a thing you say. If you'll lie to customers, you'll lie to me.
Your optimism is endearing, but the vast majority of companies I've done business with do this. Often companies I've worked for have, too – sales people are very happy to overstate the available features and capabilities of any product. From their perspective, a shoddy, rushed implementation to an unhappy client is still better than having them walk away from the purchase entirely.
Question: Does your application has x, y and z feature and can be integrated in our process easily?
Answer: Sure, all there. Just have to tweak a few settings in the GUI.
Truth: We have a bare-bone product and a semi-documented API. Feel free to implement all the features you want and adapt it to your process. We can provide you professional services (for a price, of course).
I don't work with a startup, or even in the tech industry, but this is an issue that takes up ~25% of my time. I have to keep pushing back on sales to make sure that they're not selling something that's physically impossible, or just plain stupid (but sounds good).
This is something that cuts across business in America in general, I think.
The problem is that as long as your competitor says 'yes' and you say 'no' the competitor will get the customer.
Customers should be firing companies that provide false information during the lead-up to a sale. Then the sales people can stay employed and everybody comes out ahead.
Are you making an implicit suggestion that we should tolerate fraud because it employs people?
Like so many things, it's a balance, not an opposition.
You promise the world to make a sale, then once you've signed, work frantically to make the vision you sold a reality. If you were open and honest, you wouldn't sell a thing.
The only people who lose out are those who take salespeople on their word and don't get everything agreed in writing. Never take a salesperson on their word.
Or you could, you know, make stuff worth buying.
The sales people will go crazy, so don't let them sell anything.
Have the technical people evaluate that.
You (not you the person I'm replying to, 'you' the company/sales person) that are taking money from somebody based on an untruth. It's outrageous, regardless of how often it happens. I have the right to know what I'm getting for my money. Don't lie to me, ever.
It sucks, but there are lots of markets where the customer says "please lie to me" and gives their business to the person with the most reassuring lie.
How can you possibly sustain a long-term business when you're so willing to damage business relationships?
However, the startup that (wins a big contract with a big promise && delivers on its promise) certainly has a larger chance to become a long-term business than the ones that short circuit themselves out by not winning contracts.
There's a lot of cases where you are certain you can build what the customer needs, but you can't spend resources on it until you have a sale in hand.
I do think it's much more common in highly competitive markets with no barriers to entry. Google/Facebook/Apple have pretty strong moats and large diverse markets, and can afford to release products "when they're done" and not talk about them until then. People in very competitive, low-margin markets often need the sale now. But then, people in the latter type of markets quickly get filtered out of the marketplace regardless of what they do.
At the company I work for, executives and sales people frequently make "commitments" to our customers for features that don't yet exist. People who make commitments on my behalf without even mentioning them to me beforehand (let alone asking me if what they're promising is even possible to deliver) don't get my full respect.
I'm being intentionally somewhat vague here, so it's hard to really relate the details, but in one case he discussed a feature (having to do with distributed markov chains) that not only didn't exist but, afaik, nobody in the world even understands how to do and is the subject of active research. Needless to say, not something that could be implemented in a couple days. Worse, we where talking to some phds who fucking understood the above, and they immediately started asking me how the fuck we did it!
And yes, it often made us look like complete assholes in front of customers.
I'm guessing you mean distributed Markov Chain Monte Carlo ?
Sounds like an interesting problem, I'd really like to hear more about that.
I'm really interested in "difficult" problems with significant commercial applications. (My contact info is in my profile if you don't want to post publicly).
Derail aside - I completely agree that lying about features is horrendous and I'd never ever work for a boss that did this on a regular basis.
90% of the time it is fine, contracts tend to be organised for several months in advance, long enough for you to get a feature in place.
To you, it is completely irrelevant whether the reason your employer ordered you to trash your life was because the salesman sold vaporware, or because of the phase of the moon; the outcome for you is the same regardless of the reason the order was given. You have to change your policy of obeying such orders.
My least favorite is salespeople who give product away for free (including the support thereof), hurting the bottom line, since their commission is on gross.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaporware
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/04/24/business/information-techn...
[2] http://archive.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/01/6619...
[3] http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/press_releases/1998/1764.h...
I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying), if it is some sort of technology that you aren't sure is possible or not that is certainly different.
So the salesperson/founder needs to have a good enough model of how the software works so that they know if a feature is relatively easy to provide, or if as another poster commented, it would require say a major change in a database design. I don't think it is necessarily unethical if you know that you can do it (so long as you can deliver before they start paying)
When I was being sold to, I developed a good ear for phrases like 'in development' or 'that is just a custom report'. We used put it all in writing &c.
1. In my limited experience with pitching/salesing when you say "Yeah I think we can probably build that" the customer/client will take it as "We already have this". There is no amount of rational talking and explaining you can put in place to prevent this. If they ask for something, and your answer is anything but an unequivocal "No." they will think you already have it.
2. Isn't the whole concept of MVP and lean basically going out to people and saying "We have this" then seeing if somebody pays, and if they do, making it?
One basic technique is to keep track of the life time cost of sales, development, delivery and support/maintenance for all projects, and then measure the performance of salespeople based on both income and cost (as opposed to just income) makes them a lot more motivated to sell good solutions.
I'd still prefer to frame it as "that's on our roadmap, and will be done by the time we close the contract", but then, there's little practical difference.