Those following along know that this is a primary concern of both THE REVELATOR and the doctor because, if we were truly progressing in technology, we wouldn’t still be seeing the same enterprise technology implementation failure rates of 80%+ that we saw two decades ago! (This is why the doctor decided to update, expand, and republish his Project Assurance series series from a decade ago. See Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

THE REVELATOR asked this question again in his recent article on Why is AI such a hard sell?, in comments in my recent piece on Vendor Onboarding for Payment Assurance because it reminded him on how so many vendors miss critical solution elements required by the business in their technology-first push^*, and in comments to his recent article on DPW & Comdex.

The answers are varied, and regardless of which one applies in the failure at hand, none of them are good. In fact, they are mostly so bad that THE REVELATOR, who is as fed up as the doctor with all of the sales and marketing bullcr@p, flat out stated in his most recent article that after 40-plus years, I say this with the deepest sincerity -– 90% of salespeople aren’t worth the gum stuck on the bottom of a shoe. And while the doctor would like to think the number wasn’t that high, given the failure rate, it can’t be that far off.

A lot of commentary as to why can be found in the comments to these (and other recent articles), but most of them revolve around the following reality (which the doctor also knows all too well with over 25 years in tech and Procurement).

At the majority of tech enterprises,

• sales people are compensated on how much they sell, not how successful the solution is for the customer
• sales people are pressured to hit numbers, or be cut if they have even ONE quarter in the bottom 10%
• sales people don’t stick around long enough for success to matter — as THE REVELATOR has noted,
  • sales people could make a good living selling next to nothing for 18 to 24 months drawing a good 5-figure salary every month (once they made a few sales and had a “track record”) and then changing jobs as soon as they closed a few mega deals (which could sometimes net them a six-figure departure bonus)
  • sales people make more money by changing jobs just after closing a few F500 clients (and negotiating a bigger salary building on their recent high)
  • … and even more if they can do it during the rapid rise in spending (that translates into top engineers and top sales people at any cost) at the fore-front of a hype cycle (when early vendors believe they can make the biggest sales first if they just have the “best” sales people, defined as those who just closed the biggest deals at their last job with F500/G3000 customers)

It’s all about how much, how fast they can sell … not about actually selling a solution and making a client successful (and building a pipeline for upsell over time as they learn the customers’ business and create newer, better solutions for the clients who would happily fork over fistfuls of dollars to a vendor with a track record of delivering solutions that actually worked).

As to THE REVELATOR‘s paraphrased question with regards to why don’t these sales people care that the solution they are selling is going to fail, it becomes pretty obvious when you consider the above:

• they aren’t compensated to solve customer problems; only to sell as much as possible as fast as possible and do so at ANY and ALL costs
• if it’s a big enterprise suite deal with an F500/G3000 being implemented by a third party consultancy, chances are the implementation won’t even be finished before they move on to their next job (and if it fails, then it’s the consultancy’s fault for sending the B-team)
• caring would weigh down on their conscience until they had to find a new occupation (and if they had no other significant skill, then what would they do?)

And if they are actually caring people?

Then they convince themselves the solution can be configured to work with the right tweaks, even if, in reality, it can’t.

So what is a buyer to do? What the doctor has been saying for years.

Their research!
And, most importantly, get unbiased third-party help with need identification, vendor identification, and proposal review!

Why, because, as the doctor has said many times, including in the comments in response to THE REVELATOR‘s comments, everyone needs to remember:

• there are no silver bullet tech solutions
• many “solution” providers riding the current hype cycle are just proffering a new form of silicon snake oil
• some providers don’t have anything except this snake oil, and the minute the third party fails, so do they
• relying on the wrong tech is dangerous, just like relying on airplanes made under poor quality control processes … you’ll get a few good flights out of them, and then the door will suddenly blow off as the landing gear falls off on the same flight, and then what do you do? (Unless you have ““Sully” at the helm, you pray to whatever deity you believe in, because at that point, there is nothing you can do.)

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^* whereas PaymentWorks, chronicled in that piece, started by identifying what their clients’ biggest business issues were, and solving that first — so while it’s not the broadest Supplier Management suite on the market, it is one that contains the necessary functionality to solve a very specific set of pain points that almost no other vendor does; which most of you should find shocking given that there are over 100 Supplier Management vendors, illustrating THE REVELATOR‘s comments that not enough technology providers put solving customer problems first).