Tired of sales teams calling every minor feature update a 'game changer'

I sat through a demo last week where they spent 15 minutes talking about a new button color change. Called it a 'major usability breakthrough.' Meanwhile our actual integration with Salesforce has been broken for 3 months. How are you supposed to prioritize real ops work when the sales deck treats a font swap like it's a new product launch? Does anyone else have a process for filtering out this noise during tool evaluations?

2 comments

2 Comments

taraross18h ago

They always frame it like every tiny tweak is going to transform your workflow. What worked for me was creating a simple checklist before any demo. I write down my top 3 pain points and the specific workflows that are broken. Then when they start going on about button colors, I just interrupt and ask "does this fix our Salesforce sync or not?" Usually shuts them up pretty quick. Also started requiring a written timeline for fixes before I'll even look at new features.

smith.nancy15h ago

My neighbor's kid just had a demo where the sales guy spent 20 minutes talking about a new color-coded calendar view. The kid finally just said "look, I need to see if this thing can actually pull data from our ancient AS400 system, that's literally all I care about." The sales guy went totally quiet for like 5 seconds before admitting they don't support AS400 at all lol. So yeah, your checklist thing is smart, interrupts are the only way to get them to stop with the fluff sometimes.