I’ve made more than a few mistakes in my various careers.  One of them was buying a near bowling-alley length automated tape library (ATL) with a robot whose size, if not speed, would rival any in Detroit.  I made the purchase based upon the promise of future enhancements that would ensure this would be the last tape library I would ever buy.  You see, the ATL was going to be upgradeable to a Virtual Tape Library (VTL), and all my backup and restore problems would be, if not solved, at least contained.   To be fair, it was a committee decision, but I was a strong internal proponent.  Suffice it to say that the VTL upgrade was late and more virtual than real, and the ATL wasn’t the last library the company had to purchase.  In fact, I heard rumors that a second ATL was  offered for free, since the VTL upgrade was late.  But I can’t verify the rumor.  By that time, I had moved on to a new company, where my job was predicting the future.  The irony is not lost on me.

Every technology company, new or established, needs product-development roadmaps.  The roadmaps should provide directional guidance for developers and a view into future possibilities for customers.  But roadmaps are just that: maps.  And following a map, anyone can still arrive late to the destination or get lost altogether, which brings me to the topic of sales.  I’ve been listening to a lot of sales pitches lately.  In the sales pitches, I always hear a lot about capabilities.  That discussion of capabilities usually leads me to ask about other capabilities.  In response to my questions,  one of the phrases I keep hearing is, “It’s in the next release.”  The other phrase that I hear is, “That’s in our roadmap.” In my mind, a better way to sell is to start with a discussion, not of capabilities, but of problems solved.  Then, you can ask the prospect if they have those problems.

One of today’s more successful storage companies took that tactic in their early days, at least at the company where I worked.  Rather than discussing futures, the sales team focused exclusively on current capabilities.  The first time they pitched to us, we rejected the offering, because the architecture lacked some key attributes that were important to us.  But they listened carefully to our requirements, and when they released a new product that overcame prior limitations and met requirements for a particular problem area, they were back in pitching what they now had.  They didn’t start off trying to capture all the business.  Rather, they focused on which of our problems they could address today.  Ultimately they did win all the business and swept the floor of competitors.  Who was the company that lost the business?  The company that kept selling on futures.

So whether you’ve got a departmental solution that doesn’t scale up very gracefully, or a large-data-center solution that is too costly for branch offices, sell what you’ve got, not what you will have in the future.   Even the big guys can freeze the market for only so long.  For the record, the company that lost is now winning its way back.  They learned their lesson in time to watch at least one competitor fall prey to the sell-on-futures tactic.