I’ve watched more deals than I care to remember get won on a promise rather than a product. A slide that looks great. A demo held together with tape the night before. A road map sold as if it were already shipping. The purchase order lands this quarter. The bill lands later – and it’s bigger than the deal.
Let me be precise, because this isn’t about ambition. Every ambitious product gets sold a little ahead of itself. That’s what a road map is. I’m talking about something else: selling the thing that doesn’t exist. Demoing what you can’t deliver. Promising a solution to a customer whose business you never bothered to understand. Everything else in this series flows from that moment, so that’s where I’ll start.
This is the first of three columns on the short-termism trap: how one habit – picking the quick win over the durable one – works its way through a tech business until it reaches the one place you can’t afford to lose ground: your customers.
A demo and a product are not the same thing. Not even close. A demo has to survive 20 minutes in a room you control. A product has to survive years in the customer’s world – their data, their edge cases, their staff turnover, their auditors. Closing that gap is most of the actual work.
Selling as if the gap is already closed doesn’t make the work disappear. It just moves the cost. Off your development budget, where it belongs, and onto the customer’s operations, where it does real damage.
Read: Botched SAP project costs Spar R786-million
You can spot one of these deals by how the delivery goes. Timelines slip. Scope quietly shrinks. The customer’s own people end up patching holes they were told didn’t exist. What you sold as a finished platform turns up half-built. And your best engineers – the ones who should be building the next thing – spend their time firefighting the last thing.
Why we keep doing it
Blaming the salesperson misses the point. The pressure is built into the system. Sales gets paid on this quarter’s bookings, not the renewal three years out. A founder raising money needs the logo more than the margin. A listed company under shareholder pressure will take revenue it can book now over quality it can only bank later.
Add thin domain knowledge and thin delivery capacity – both common in our market – and selling vapour starts to look almost rational. Almost.
What it actually costs
The costs are easy to ignore, because they land late and on someone else’s desk first. Start with trust. In enterprise tech, trust is the whole game – and South African enterprise tech is a village. A botched delivery reaches your next three prospects before your account manager does.
Then the rest of the bill arrives. Legal exposure for calling something “delivered” when it wasn’t. A customer whose own plans broke because they believed you. An engineering team permanently in arrears. The public sector gives us the priciest examples – big launches, budgets that only ever go up, deadlines that outlast the ministers who set them. The private sector version is quieter: it just shows up as churn instead of a headline.
Let me give the other side its strongest form, because it isn’t nothing. Ship early. Learn from real users. Iterate. “Fake it till you make it” has built real companies. Sometimes selling ahead of the build is how you fund the build. Wait for perfect and you never ship – and a competitor eats your lunch while you polish.
I buy a lot of that. But there’s a line, and it isn’t blurry. Selling a road map you’re committed to and resourced for is ambition. Selling a capability you have no real path to deliver is a lie with an invoice attached. The first earns trust when you deliver, and brings long-term customers. The second spends trust you can’t buy back. Speed is a virtue. Being dishonest about what exists is not speed – it’s just dishonesty in a hurry.
The honest alternative
The fix isn’t to stop selling ambitiously. It’s to be honest about what’s built, what’s road map and what’s a wish – and to price and resource the gap between them. That means a sales team allowed to say “not yet”, A commercial model that rewards the renewal, not just the signature, and enough humility to understand a customer’s business before you promise to transform it.
I mean that literally. When we built network management systems, the rule was that everyone – sales included – understood the customer’s networking protocols as well as the customer did, or better. You don’t earn the right to sell someone a solution until you understand their world well enough to see the problem they haven’t spotted yet.
Read: R12.1-billion wasted as government IT projects collapse
The pattern repeats itself. A customer pushes hard for the quick win – value now, this quarter. The honest answer is almost always: not today, but together we can build it over the next few years. It sounds like the weaker pitch. It isn’t. Customers can smell the “no problem, we can do that” routine from across the room, and most would rather back someone they trust to deliver than someone who says yes to everything. The moment a customer decides they can trust you, they stop fighting you and start backing you – to do the right thing, at the right time.
It’s slower. It wins fewer deals this quarter. It wins far more over a decade, because the deals it wins stay won.
I’ve spent my career on both sides of this equation, as a supplier and a customer. One lesson has held every time, and it’s boring: the market prices in the truth eventually. You can borrow against the future – your engineering capacity, your customer’s patience, your own reputation. Fine. But it’s a loan, not a gift. And the interest compounds.
That compounding is the subject of my next piece. The shortcuts you take to sell and ship a half-built product don’t vanish when the deal closes. They pile up inside the system as technical debt. That’s when the interest starts.
- The author, Jannie van Zyl, has spent more than three decades in technology – founding several companies and holding senior positions in some of the industry’s largest. He’s a leading voice on innovation and the future, and writes here under his own name
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