Years ago, I found myself sitting in a conference room dealing with a question that I’ve gotten thousands of times in my career: Was the technology I was representing, which I created as the CTO of an enterprise technology company (I’m being purposely vague), the right fit for a specific customer problem that I had just learned about in that conference room?
This would have been an easy sale and one that we needed to make our quarter. All I needed to do was agree with the customer, who was already convinced that my technology was a “perfect fit.” Instead, I explained that a competitor’s technology was likely a better fit and had the features and functions needed for this problem. The salesperson shot daggers at me from across the table. Commission gone.
