I once had a humorous poster listing Murphy’s Laws on Technology, which included this shrewd observation:
Any given program, while running, is obsolete
…because everything can be improved. You’re never done. There’s always something that could be added or taken away; another angle, a new technology, a change in the market that will render your solution, well, obsolete, even if it’s fresh into customer beta.
Claiming a solution to be complete, fully integrated, and end to end is an unnecessary and lazy sales tactic. Any skeptic in your audience will perk up and start challenging you.
- It’s clearly not complete. There’s always something more that customization or competitive solutions can do. But maybe it fits their needs now with room to grow?
- Fully integrated implies that two systems are as one. And they aren’t. They’re two systems brought together through integration technologies and choices. That the integration is packaged, configurable, and supported is the value.
- End to end applies to use cases and transactional data in a business process. What your customer cares about is their use-cases and their business process. Talk specifically about how your solution handles those from end to end.