That shift is the most consistent thing I have observed in months of sitting across the table from technology vendors and enterprise organisations. Different companies, different technologies, different markets, always the same pattern. The presentation is polished, the innovation is real, the passion for the product is undeniable. And it is almost never what buyers remember.
I have watched two vendors present, in effect, the same capability, and leave two completely different impressions. One walked through the feature set and closed strong on the demo. The other spent half the time asking how the buyer’s existing systems were wired together, then explained where their solution would sit inside that, what it would displace, and what it would leave untouched. Only one of those vendors got remembered a week later.
What buyers are asking about, once the meeting ends, is rarely the product itself. They want to understand how a solution will fit alongside the investments they have already made, who will help them make it successful, how disruptive implementation is likely to be and whether it will genuinely move the organisation forward or simply introduce another technology that needs managing.
Underneath those questions sits a distinction most vendor organisations never make explicit, between the problem they have built a product to solve and the problem the buyer actually has. The two are not always the same thing. A product team can define its problem accurately at the level of the part, the workflow it speeds up, the manual task it removes, the data it cleans, and still miss the buyer’s problem, because the buyer’s problem is defined at the level of the whole. Every organisation runs on a chain of inputs, outputs and outcomes, and a capability that improves one output in isolation can leave the outcome untouched, or worse, create a new dependency somewhere else in the chain. A feature is a property of the part. An advantage is what that feature does within the part. Benefit only exists in the relationship between the part and the whole, in whether the outcome the buyer actually needs moves as a result.
This is where I find the analyst’s question more useful than the salesperson’s. It is not “does the product work.” It is “does the team behind the product understand the problem the way the buyer experiences it.” Product leadership can be technically excellent and still be solving the wrong-scoped problem. Marketing can describe the capability perfectly and still market it as a part when the buyer is evaluating it as a dependency within a whole. And when that gap exists inside the vendor, between product, marketing and sales, it walks straight into the room with the sales team, whether they intend it or not. The buyer feels it immediately, because they are the ones living inside the whole system the vendor has only partially understood.
Working in partnerships gives me the opportunity to see both sides of these conversations, the enthusiasm and innovation from vendors, and what enterprise organisations are actually trying to achieve at the level of the whole business. The strongest relationships are built where those two conversations meet, and where the vendor’s own organisation, not just the person in the room, understands which problem it is actually solving.
Before your next customer meeting, ask yourself one simple question – What do you want buyers to remember when the presentation is over?
If the answer is a list of features and advantages, your opportunity may end when the meeting does. If the answer is that your product team, your marketing and your sales function all understood the same problem, the buyer’s problem, and showed where you genuinely change what their whole system can achieve, the dialogue and the analysis are only just beginning.
By
Donna Lamden,
EVP Partnerships and Category Development, Bloor Research International
Contact :