Dear SaaStr: Is It Common To Oversell in B2B?
Yes. It is very common in true enterprise software, i.e. sales of complex, expensive solutions to large problems. Most sales execs (not all, but most) will oversell.
And maybe it’s OK, up to a point. Up to a point.
When you are selling a $500k, $1m+ piece of software, it’s not a widget. It’s a solution to a large problem.
You are always selling more than just the existing workflows, etc.
Sometimes, that vision you are selling is the product as is plus a bunch of configuration, professional services, and add-ons.
Sometimes, it’s 6 months of custom feature build.
It’s OK, up to a point. Customers know it will take time. And in many cases, it will take a while anyway for the full, magic solution to a huge problem to be fully deployed.
But rough-and-tough, you don’t want to sell too much more than 6 months ahead of the roadmap. It may even take your customer 6 months to roll your service into production. But beyond that, even with reprioritization, extra services, implementation partner help, etc. … you can’t catch up to the “oversell”.
As CEO, you have to make sure the sales team doesn’t go too far. After all, they are incented to close almost any real to get their commission. And the CRO to hit the plan. Even if that customer is brutally unhappy and doesn’t renew, sales may not care.
And it’s worse today in the Age of AI. Forward deployed engineers exist, in large part, to make sure this doesn’t happen. That the app actually works when you go live. And ideally, even before the customer buys.
