It is very common in true enterprise software, i.e. sales of complex, expensive solutions to large problems.
And it’s OK, 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”.
