The Cranky Sales Engineer swears that the next marketing person who flies into town and plunks himself down in the CSE’s cube and asks, “So what deals are you working on with my product?” will be boiled in his own bullshit.

The CSE does not need a marketing funnel hawk.  Funnel hawks, for those who don’t know, are a parasitic form of marketing dweeb who think that they can maintain a funnel report by badgering the sales force.  The sales force avoids talking to these people for the same reason they don’t reply to spam, because any communication will cause a sudden and annoying increase in valueless communication.

Compare this approach to another marketing person who has a 100% handle on the funnel.  When this person learned about a deal I was working on, she hooked me up with a dynamite piece of training collateral that taught the customer how to use the product while highlighting all the features.  The CSE keeps this marketing person apprised of all deals in hopes of getting help in closing the deals.

(BTW.  Do not confuse funnel hawk activity with the CPM’s gathering of pricing information by talking to the sales force.  I can’t imagine who would fire a PM for such an activity, but that person needs to try a new line of work.  Perhaps something involving a squeegee and a dirty rag.)

Do not become a funnel hawk.  If you want to know what’s happening in the field, provide useful help to your sales team and you will be welcomed with open arms.  Random calls asking  “How’s that deal coming?” will not make you anyone’s friend.  Instead, become a sales partner, and you will get all the info you want.

Oh…alcohol helps as well.

For years, the Cranky Product Manager has been dealing with all those whiny Sales Droids. 

You know, those people who moan all the time about how Sales is The. Hardest. Job. Ever., as they yap on their bluetooths while driving around in their Porche 911s?   You know, those dudes/dudettes who always win deals because of their mad persistence, unequaled interpersonal aptitude, and their wicked awesome sales skills? Yet when they lose it’s always the fault of the product or the price?  

Yep.  Those Droids.  You know who the CPM is talkin’ about.

Anyway, the Droids have been bitching for YEARS to the Cranky Product Manager about the price of her product.  “It’s way too expensive.”,  “I can’t sell it at that price,”  “The competition is priced so much lower we can’t compete,” “We need to drop the price by at least 20%,”  blah, blah, blah. 

All that time the Cranky Product Manager resisted dropping the price.  Yes, her product was priced higher than the competition, but it offered way more value.  Plus, being a wicked big geek, the Cranky PM created this elaborate pricing model spreadsheet based on shitloads of historical pricing and sales data .  It showed price was relatively inelastic. 

Well, fast forward to 2009.  The economy is in the shit and the Droids all miss their numbers by a mile.  Their screaming about the “too high” price reaches 120 decibels.  Loud enough that it catches the attention of The Man, AKA The Quasi-Playboy, AKA The Dirty Semi-Old (50-65 years old) Man Who is Always Scanning the Marketing Events Planning Staff for New Blond Mistresses.  AKA  The CEO.

So, the CEO calls the Cranky Product Manager into his office.  After complimenting her hair and the way her jeans fit, asking her if she is still happily married, and trying to give her a George-W-style shoulder rub,  The Big Boss tells her to drop the price to the one the Droids are begging for. 

The Cranky Product Manager sez, “No Effing Way,  Mr. CEO (and I mean that in the most respectful way).  Behold my awesome spreadsheet!  Dropping the price will NOT lead to more units sold and will make the product unprofitable.”

“You look hot when you’re angry,” sez the CEO, “But we’re still dropping the price.  I want you to create a new forecast based on the new price.  Not your lovely theoretical spreadsheet.  Instead, do it bottoms-up and go ask each sales rep how much he’ll sell at the new price.  Oh, and let me know when you tire of that husband of yours.”

And so the Cranky PM announces the price cut to the field. She then asks each rep, one at  a time, how much product he/she was committing to sell based on the new price.

And SHOCK OF ALL SHOCKS, the Droids sandbag it.  Apparently, even with a 25% price cut they can only sell about 3% more units than the numbers they had signed up for just 3 weeks earlier. 

Guess price wasn’t the issue after all.  WHO COULD HAVE GUESSED THAT WOULD HAPPEN?   Oh wait, I know this one…. Yep.  The CRANKY PRODUCT MANAGER guessed it!

AS EXPECTED, the New and Improved bitching and moaning from the Droids began immediately .  “The price is too low”,  “You just made it 25% harder to make my number!“, “With a price like that, people will think we offer less capability than the competition”, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.  Will. It. Never. End.

Even the 2-year-old CrankyKid changes his mind less often.  And even the CrankyDog can remember past events  better than Sales Droids. 

There are two things you can always count on at DysfunctoSoft: 1) The Droids will never like the price, and 2) The CEO will always skeeve you out.

The Cranky Sales Engineer has been truly touched by the tales of abuse heaped upon his brethren in Marketing (see the Cranky Marketer Posts).  Sitting among a din of the kind of violin music that must surely accompany such tales of woe, the Cranky Sales Engineer helps in the only way he can.  So, to wit, here is The Cranky Sales Engineer’s Guide for Marketing: How to Get the Respect of Sales.

There is ONE major issue the marketing person must understand in order to gain the respect of Sales.  This understanding is easier to come by when one has actually worked in sales (hint: never use the phrase, “well I’ve never been in sales myself”  to try to influence a sales person), but a marketing person who has never carried a bag or a number can still work to intellectually understand the issue.

The marketing person must understand the massive, crushing, and depressing rate of failure that goes into every sale, especially a sale to a new account.  For a smaller product,  you typically call 100 people to find 10 who have some need for the product, but just one who will be able to negotiate the budgetary hurdles necessary to buy the product.

For larger deals (larger being B2B deals of a million dollars or more) a sales person must find at least three million dollars of potential business to guarantee one million dollars of revenue.  The other two million will be lost to budget cuts, organizational changes, and competition.

Unless you can understand, in your gut, the true and alarming rarity of a real deal with real revenue behind it, you will not be able to truly gain the respect of a sales person whose personal fortune is tied to bringing that rare real deal through to closure. Unless you truly get what the sales team is dealing with or asking for, you will be deemed irrelevant to the process of success and shunted aside.  You gain respect, by making the rare live deal happen.  Here are something things to do to gain respect:

Tell the Truth

If a product is not going to be ready in time for the deal, tell the sales person it won’t be ready.  If a feature won’t be out, tell the sales person it won’t be out.  You know what will happen if you do that?  You will probably get yelled at.  Because the sales person has sifted through three tons of dreck to find this one live deal and now you’re saying we don’t have the product the customer is asking for.

When that happens, suck it up and step back.  Let the storm pass and find out why the customer wants the feature.  See if you can get to the solution a different way.  If you can’t give a firm, real, date for when the feature will ship.  Be pessimistic, but be right.

Deliver on Time

If you are the kind of person who delivers when you say you will, the Cranky Sales Engineer can build mountains with you.  But if you don’t deliver, you are just another problem to be managed or worked around.  Being a problem is not the road to respect.

Work in Field Time not Factory Time

Things happen fast in the field.  When a customer asks a question, a clock starts.  A fast clock.  A clock that wants an answer in a day.  A clock that cannot wait for everyone to get together and have a meeting to discuss the question, and that meeting will happen next week because that’s when we have that meeting, and no, Cranky Sales Engineer, you can’t tell the customer anything before that meeting, because it will probably be wrong, and yes you’ll have to stand out there, with your thumb up your ass, looking like an idiot because we can’t move any faster than getting an answer to you in a week.

The field works fast.  If you want respect, you need to work fast too.

Earning Respect

Folks in marketing have a handicap when it comes to gaining respect.  The things they do are just so damn intangible that its hard to say whether marketing has gone well or gone poorly.  This is a handicap when it comes to dealing with the Cranky Sales Engineer who is measured on hard dollars and being connected to successful deals.  The Cranky Sales Engineer doesn’t have time to figure out if marketing is really working.

Instead, the Cranky Sales Engineer has been called into an account because, after hundreds of phone calls, and dozens of meetings a sales person has found a real live wiggling deal that could actually result in some money.  And now, at this crucial point, the sales person needs the Cranky Sales Engineer to make the product hum and demonstrate to the customer that the CSE’s company is worth the money.

This is when marketing can earn the respect of the sales force, by recognizing the difficulty of finding a real deal and responding quickly and accurately when a deal presents itself.

Marketers who recognizes the difficulty of finding a real opportunity and responds to calls for help with urgency and accuracy will be respected.

The rest will be ignored.

The Cranky Product Manager is SUPER LAZY these days. Once again, she’s letting someone else do the work – the Cranky Marketer – the dude/dudette in charge of Marketing at a B2B tech company. This is part TWO of three (see part one here).

This post is a  longie but a goodie, so check it.

—————-

The Cranky Marketer on The Problem with Sales and Senior Management

While I really had a tough time with Engineering when I was a Product Manager, it was nothing compared to the problems I have with Sales, now that I’m in Marketing.

As individuals, most salespeople are pretty decent folk. There are a few assholes in every company who don’t give a sh*t about who they abuse en route to meeting quota, but when it’s getting late in the quarter or the economy sours, and account reps are hustling to hit their number, even the normal ones turn into the highest paid set of babies and whiners you’ve ever seen.

And while they’ll blame everyone in sight if needed, a lot of the complaints point to Marketing.

“There weren’t enough leads.

“The lead quality was sh*t.”

“I needed new success stories. The existing ones aren’t relevant to my prospects.”

And my favorite of all:

“My territory is different than other territories. The standard collateral doesn’t apply to my patch. What else have we got?”

And while this is clearly an exercise in creative excuse making, Sr. Management never fails to give in to this crap and an edict comes down from above to generate more “quality” leads, “refresh” the collateral etc. And the downward spiral continues.

There are ways to address this, but most companies don’t have the patience, skill set or culture to fix the problem. They’re too caught up in the quarterly tactical objectives than to do what is right.

First of all, even in companies where there are way too many leads – and believe it or not, I once worked in a company where even an order taker could meet quota – a number of reps complained there weren’t enough leads.

Why is it that no matter how good the lead generation programs, 98% of leads end up in the dustbin? And isn’t it such an amazing coincidence that no matter what company, no matter what product, 49 out of 50 people who are counted as leads turn out to be uninterested or unable to buy the product? What are the odds of that?

Here’s a novel idea: put some accountability on the sales people beyond simply “making their number”. I’m pretty sure some territories are better than others, but there’s no way all sales reps are doing their jobs even moderately well.

I’ve seen sales reps who can’t tell you what business their prospects are in, what the business issues are for some of their larger opportunities or whether any channel partners have in roads at a prospect and can help move the deal forward. Forget about channel conflict or compensation issues for while. The question here is whether or not the rep even has a clue about the dynamics of the account. But that’s rarely analyzed. It’s time consuming to actually keep on top of sales reps. It’s a lot easier to tell Marketing to do a better job.

For many reps it’s simply a numbers game. With enough leads, even a very unsophisticated approach can yield results. And instead of trying to maximize the value of the deal, they’ll discount more to close the deal sooner. But then, they’re compensated on quarterly revenue so why not take a smaller amount now right?
So it’s not their fault. It’s Sr. Management who set up the sales compensation plan that forces them to behave that way. And that compensation plan along with Management’s tacit consent of the “big baby” behavior, in turn forces Marketing to fall into line and ensure the reps are properly “fed and nurtured”.

Moving beyond the sales issues, it turns out that virtually every Sr. Executive wants to be a Marketer. Yup, absolutely true. Why else do they forward emails they receive from competitors to the Marketing department, with comments like “FYI, check out the messaging in this email I just received.” Or, “Has your team seen what X is doing lately?”

OK, thanks Mr. CFO. First, I’m glad you are taking such an interest in our competitors that you’ve decided to surreptitiously add yourself to their marketing database. But do I forward you links to our competitors’ 10K statements pointing out how much better they are doing financially than we are? Or how about this Mr. CTO? Maybe I should start forwarding the patents our competitors are filing, you know, just as an FYI.

And I hate nothing more than the Sr. Exec who decided to spend 5 minutes actually reading our website, and then starts making suggestion on how to “tweak” it. Listen, those pages on the website have been like that for the last 9 months. What took you so long to send your suggestions forward? Needed a bit of time to think about them? Thanks, but we’re way ahead of you.

By the way, we don’t “tweak” anything in Marketing. We have a plan and we’re trying to execute on it. We’re measuring our work at every stage in more detail than any other part of the business. I’ve got so many metrics and measurements I could unload on you, you’d think you’re an actuary.

And one more thing. The website isn’t simply a “website”, its a freaking web application. It’s got integrations into our CRM, bug tracking and order processing systems. The Partner and Customer portals are sitting atop a home-grown CMS (cuz the company was too cheap to let us license a real one) and both portals are tied back into our Identity Management System. There is a lot of content on the site that we have update regularly. It’s a critical part of our business operation.

And yet, we have to keep it up and running with no budget, on second rate servers and without full support from IT. Why? Because they’ve decided they’ll only support the “back end” databases etc, but the “front end” belongs to Marketing. Gee, silly me. I thought we all worked for the same company.

I could keep going but I’m sure you get the point. Somewhere between having to baby sit the sales team, let everyone think they are a marketer, and maintain a complex web application with only a minimal development staff, we still have to do our marketing jobs. And none of this includes all the crap we have to put up with from Product Management.

I’ll get to that in the next installment.

Annual planning is nearly over and the Cranky Sales Engineer almost has his quota for the year.  In a tequila inspired fit of account-planning ecstasy, he has decided to share how he and his brethren actually sell products and what product managers can actually do to help.

The Cranky Sales Engineer and the rest of the sales force look for a mystical confluence of three features to make any deal happen:

• A Technical Problem—Nobody buys anything because its “cool” or “neat” unless they are penniless early adopters.  The rest of the market needs a problem to solve or they aren’t interested.  We need to find a real problem.  Not a “my back bothers me sometimes” problem but a “I’m going to knock my own septic molar out with an ice skate” kind of problem.
• A Relationship—The Cranky Sales Engineers spends an inordinate amount of time at sporting events, dinners, lunches, and, yes, pub crawls, with customers.  Why?  Because customers will only buy if there is a relationship. Without it, they don’t trust us to actually solve the problem.
• A Business Proposition—There needs to be a business deal on the table that makes economic sense.  Without it, the problem remains unsolved, and the relationship is just another excuse to go to the ball game.  The business numbers must add up.

The Cranky Sales Engineer is constantly astounded by product managers who manage to be completely irrelvent to this process.  These managers talk about features with no problems.  In fact, that’s all they talk about.  Features they have, features they will have, features they don’t have, and the Cranky SE’s favorite: features that don’t work.

What can you do to help your SE’s sell your product?

• Tie features to technical problems—You should know what gawd-awful problem you’re solving before you invest in new features.  It’s true, that sometimes the problem being solved is that the customer is tired of five mouse-clicks when there could be three. But that’s a problem if you have to do it 100 times a day.  Show us a technical problem to solve.
• Make sure the features work—Trust is one of the keys to a sale, and the Cranky Sales Engineer loses trust and credibility every time a feature isn’t fully tested.  Here is a clue to when your sales engineers have lost the customer’s trust: the customer asks, “Don’t you guys test your programs?  Why do I have to do it?”
• Ask the sales team about pricing—You can screw up pricing two ways.  If you make it too high, we can’t sell the product.  But worse, if you make it too low, we can’t make any money selling the product.  Here’s a thought.  Ask us.  Ask the good account managers and good sales engineers.  The good ones don’t want to sell cheap products, and they especially don’t sell on price.  Make it worth our while.

It’s hard to make all three parts of a deal line up.  Customers have no money.  They are retrenching.  Help us find toothaches and give your sales team the tools to pull the the deals together.

Despite the Cranky Sales Engineer’s best efforts to educate product managers in the proper way to train a Sales Engineer, he is now sitting towards the front of a large room being pummeled by wordy slides.  He has written this dispatch from the front, in hopes that product managers will understand the nature of the immense pain they inflict on their captive audiences.

Some highlights of this death march of a presentation:

• One hour into the presentation the marketing guy put up a slide called “Agenda”.  It is ten items long. He has promised us that he will talk about each one in detail, this has given the Cranky Sales Engineer the time to write this dispatch.
• The presenter insists on using slides that the sales force has been presenting for the past year.  The Cranky Sales Engineer thinks he presents them better.
• The Cranky Sales Engineer has suggested a murder/suicide pact to the SE next to him. The suggestion was met with enthusiasm.
• After hearing the presenter say “But, you already know this” for the third time, the Cranky Sales Engineer knows why he drinks.

Only an hour and twenty minutes have passed … The Cranky Sales Engineer observes that he must be reaping the wages of sin.

The Cranky Sales Engineer has been reading Paco’s musings on moving into sales with some interest.  Having been laid off four times, and having made the transition between marketing and sales and back and back again, and having been a manager of sales engineers, he offers the following suggestions:

Numbers, Numbers, Numbers—The Cranky Sales Engineer is not interested in generic tasks that stink of pointless meetings.  The Cranky Sales Engineer is impressed by numbers.   A resume entry that says, “Led a cross-functional team responsible for…” is headed for the trash.  A resume that says, “Grew product from $5M to $15M in revenue in 5-years” will get an interview.

Customers, Customers, Customers—The field is not interested in your ability to run a meeting or set a direction. The field is interested in your ability to please a customer.  The Cranky Sales Engineer and his cohorts view customer satisfaction as the most important thing in the world.  Specific entries on satisfying specific customers are key. “Conducted a customer satisfaction survey” is bad. “Increased customer satisfaction from 50% to 90% at Big-Company through a user council meeting” is good.

Sales, Sales, Sales—The Cranky Sales Engineer has reservations about misrepresenting one’s title on a resume.  In the CSE’s organization, such a deception will get the applicant a quick visit to the exit.  That said, highlighting one’s sales experience in explicit terms is good.  If you were part of a $10M deal, say, “Worked with field to drive closure of a $10M deal” or better yet, “Instrumental in closing $10M deal at Big-Company” or better yet, “Instrumental in driving $12M in business in 2008.”

The Cranky Sales Engineer’s parting advice: “Numbers talk, bullshit walks.”  Find out the real numbers behind the value you created.  If you don’t have any real numbers this time, make sure you have them for the next time.

Remember the Cranky Sales Engineer? He did such a WICKED AWESOME job of bringing the CRANK (plus a dose of BITCH, MOAN, and don’t forget WHINE) to this blog, that going forward he’s gonna be a semi-regular feature on this
here blog. Yippee!

This is WICKED AWESOME because the Cranky Product Manager is finding it hard to keep up with this blog and could use some help. In fact, she would not mind recruiting a Cranky Engineer, Cranky Marketer, and Cranky CEO to
occasionally post as well.

Any takers? Write the CPM an email. (there will be a try out)

(Continuing the Cranky Product Manager’s long-winded response to the Cranky Sales Engineer’s diatribe on training at Sales Kickoff.  See part 1 here.)

Let the Cranky Product Manager next respond to this nugget of advice on product training, courtesy of the Cranky Sales Engineer:

7. Bring the Cranky Sales Engineer some real references.

Ummm, Cranky Sales Engineer, isn’t that YOUR job?

Let the Cranky Product Manager get this straight… before YOU can start selling the NEW product (or new version of the product) you want REAL references from REAL customers.  And you want the product manager to provide these references to you on a silver platter?

OK. Would you also like a mint on your pillow and a foot rub?

What, you can’t sell something unless someone ELSE has ALREADY sold it?  You must be a real SALES GENIUS! So glad we have you on board and pay you the big bucks!  Thank Cheezus you are at a tech company, where new products and new versions come out constantly.

Seriously, NO ONE has the new product / new release yet. Hence the word “NEW.”  There are NO “real” references yet.  That is why Product Management is even at Kickoff – to train you on the product. So YOU can sell it to real customers and go get those references.  The Cranky Product Manager can (and does) tell you about the customers who gave input on the product concept and feedback on pre-release versions, but you’d likely scoff at that.

OK, one more:

The Cranky Sales Engineer is giving up chunks of his life to sit in your presentation—he may even have gotten up early to get there and may be hung over. He will sell your products if they add value and make customers lives better. But, if he walks out of your meeting mourning two hours of his life that he’ll never get back, you can kiss his support goodbye until the next Scotch-soaked Sales Kickoff in 2010.

AWWWW. Poor, put-upon, entitled Cranky Sales Engineer. Having to get up EARLY! While you are HUNG OVER, no less!

Dear Cheezus, how outrageous of your company to interfere with your PAID, booze-drenched, awards-laded excursion to the tropics. How DARE they expect you to attend and listen to some presentations about the products you are PAID to sell. The nerve!  It is all such an inconvenience when you are trying to get your drink on.

Anyway, just remember that while you got up early (boo fraking hoo), the Cranky Product Manager giving the presentation got up EARLIER. And while you’re hung-over after a night of clubbing, strippers, gambling, cigars, and boozing it up, the Cranky Product Manager spent that same night working on that presentation and practicing it in her hotel room’s bathroom mirror, over and over. NO HANGOVER, but no fun either.

You moan about losing two hours of your life, but remember that the Cranky PM lost way more than that working on that fraking demo you so casually ignore.

Conclusion

Cranky Sales Engineer, you are indeed lucky.  No matter how disrespectful you are of the CPM during product training (because she didn’t bring you references, had slides with too many words, and had the nerve to be enthusiastic about the future), and no matter if you “kissed your support” of her goodbye, the Cranky Product Manager will still help you sell the product.  She won’t kiss her support of you goodbye.

Why? Because she’s not a coin-operated mercenary.  Because she actually cares about what’s good for the product and what’s good for the entire company.  Because she is not solely focused on her own wallet. Unlike the vast majority of you Droids.

So, yes, in a few weeks the Cranky Product Manager will save your ass yet again. Even though you won’t deserve it. She will give the product demo to YOUR customer — the demo you SHOULD have learned during training but didn’t.  She will give you a private tutorial on the customer problems and how the product alleviates them. Because she’s not going to let a ding-dong Droid get in the way of her product’s success.

Surely, the LEAST you can do in return is give the Cranky Product Manager the sales commission that SHE earned for you.

Earlier, we had an excellent guest post from The Cranky Sales Engineer. The Cranky Product Manager thought much of it was brilliant, but nevertheless some parts irritated her.  Enough that the Cranky Product Manager’s response takes TWO posts. This is part 1.

Let’s start with this paragraph:

3. Do not tell the Cranky Sales Engineer how excited you are about the future—The Cranky Sales Engineer makes money selling real things that exist today…

OK, Cranky Sales Engineer. The Cranky Product Manager is more than happy to oblige. No excitement — promise!  She’ll get up in front of a class of SEs and say she thinks the future BLOWS CHUNKS.  (Oh wait, are desperation and panic forms of excitement?)

But that’s not what you meant, Cranky Sales Engineer, is it?

So maybe you’re suggesting the Cranky Product Manager forgo the roadmap presentation?  No problem, the Cranky Product Manager is happy to comply…. but only if YOU AND THE REST OF THE SALES DROIDS PROMISE YOU WON’T ASK FOR THE ROADMAP FOR THE REST OF THE YEAR.

Yup, you got it — one of the main reasons the roadmap preso is in Sales Kickoff is because you Sales Droids ASK FOR IT — nay, DEMAND IT.  And if you don’t want it now, you’ll definitely want it in a few months.  Because you want to know what’s coming up, jackass.  Don’t pretend you don’t.  Seriously. The Cranky Product Manager has NEVER met a Sales Engineer who didn’t want to know what was planned for the product. Ever. Get over yourself, already.

And hats off to you for wanting to sell what exists today. That makes you a rarity among Sales Droids. Really.

Next:

When simple features are missing or broken today, do not tell the Cranky Sales Engineer that they will be fixed in 2010 unless you want the Cranky Sales Engineer to start selling your product in 2010.

Guess what?  EVERY product has missing and broken features*.  As a Sales Engineer, you might have no idea, and your stomach might churn when you hear the truth**, but many mature, industry-leading products regularly ship with well over 10K known bugs and feature requests.  Yep. (Don’t tell the customers.)

So if you want to wait until everything is fixed before you start selling, well you might want to look for a new profession.

Next objectionable paragraph:

6. Do not have more than seven words on a slide

You gotta be kidding.  This is not a Guy Kawasaki-style psych-up speech.  This is heavy, technical content that you need to know cold.  The content cannot be found anywhere else.  It’s stuff you’ll want to refer to later.   7 words per slide is not appropriate and not adequate.

Ok, ok.  In theory, this MIGHT work if people typically remembered 100% of a presentation instead of  just 10%.  And it might work if the Cranky Sales Engineer and the rest of the Droids didn’t show up to PM presentations late/drunk/hungover, or if they didn’t just skip the presentations altogether.

As a result of the above, plus an SE turnover rate that matches fruit flies, you Sales Droids NEED slides that you can read later, that have enough content for you to learn with out a voice-over.

Don’t suggest that the Cranky PM record the presentation — she tested that idea and has hard data proving that printable PPTs are more effective and more used than recordings.

(To be continued…. see the next post.)

————

* In enterprise software, at least. The Cranky Product Manager appreciates that several industries (medical, government, hardware) have much higher quality standards, but she assumes the Cranky Sales Engineer would not be bitching about a released product being broken if he were in those industries.

** Rest assured, the Cranky Product Manager also feels physically ill when looking at the huge-osity of the bug list.