Salesperson Tricks Part IV

This continues my periodic series of things sales folks say during pitches. Earlier ones are here , here and here.

a) "R&D spend is not correlated to innovation"

"There are a number of studies which show that innovation is not tied to how much you spend on R&D" is a objection handler when salespeople are asked why only 5 -10-15% of revenues go towards R&D. True enough, but here is something which is even more guaranteed. No - zip - product innovation ever comes out of the 50+% that many tech vendors spend on sales, marketing and administration. So, try reversing the proportion between R&D and SG&A.

b) "Go ahead save some money now. You will need it during the lawsuit."

Implication that going with a lower priced competitor is inherently risky. Well, let's see - Southwest Airlines has consistently been a low cost competitor. And in 30+ years of its history has the best safety record of all major US airlines. There are outages every day at Oracle and EDS customers - it's just if a SaaS vendor has an outage it is more publicized. Most buyers do additional due diligence when they go with a lower cost vendor. Most come to the conclusion that incremental risk (if any) is worth the savings.