There are great salesmen out there that put in the work and know their domain and all that.
Real estate and software sales it's just too easy to be lazy and not give a shit and still get by.
Our sales people literally just do a demo. If the customer is like, "Well I like this program and the price is great but it can't do X currently which my business needs" then they sign the dotted line and my programmers are on the hook to pull whatever obese rabbit out of our virgin assholes that we need to, by some date. At that point my engineers are the fucking sales people and deserve 100% of commission.
I remember my software sales phase.
Fuck the engineers. Nothing happens until something sells.
I had a college professor who was a former Pacemaker Engineer. He had the exact same take. He didn't have it ass backwards.
Jesus, thank you for that contribution. You are clearly an expert on the topic.
I actually sold ERP/resource planning software to Fortune 500 companies for a few years.
I'm just fucking with you. The correct answer is "with enough time and money, this software can do whatever you want...now why is your business so different than thousands of others utilizing best practices?"
If your sales guys are just doing demos, they give no fucks about the customer's needs OR what they can deliver. Recipe for failed implementation for the customer or choking down costs to the provider.
Bring the Throbber in to consult and I'll set your woeful sales guys straight.
I don't even clash with sales much, I'm just saying that like with project managers, analysts, some other positions, it's easy for them to take advantage. Less so than others because you know how many deals they close. In the end we have to "close the deal" because there's zero pressure on sales to be like "well yes we don't do this thing quite like you're used to, but maybe we have some other existing thing you can use instead." They make zero effort in that regard and people think it's okay because you're supporting another workflow now, and maybe in the future someone else has the same one. It often doesn't work out like that though.
Project managers are absolutely on my shit list, they get out of being accountable for creating crisis situations, and companies don't do a good enough job of monitoring their performance.