Don't sell propellant instead of payload

When you are launching a rocket, you generally have two types of things you send up into space - 1) the things you want in space (people, satellites, cool experiments with earth worms*), crudely your "payload", 2) all the things that you have to send up into space to get them there (tonnes of metal, compressed gasses, computers, fuel etc), crudely your "propellant".

Selling is sort of the same thing. When you sell something you typically have a payload and a propellant:

• Payload: The thing you are actually making significant money from
• Propellant: All the other things you have to do in order to help your customer to buy the thing, or make use of it

The problem is that you pay a lot of very smart people in marketing to talk a lot about the propellant, and over time, it's very easy to start to 'drinking the kool aid' and think that your propellant is you payload. Moreover, by definition it's often easier to get customers to buy the propellant than the payload (if this wasn't true, you wouldn't need propellant).

In long difficult sales cycles, or in early stage products, people start to confuse progress selling the propellant with progress selling the payload.

Some fictionalised examples I've seen:

• "Great conversation with Acme corp, the CIO is really excited, they really need innovation"... maybe, but I bet you don't actually sell 'innovation', and does the CIO actually connect what you really sell to innovation? Does she even know what you sell?
• "Great conversation with Acme corp, their Head of Operations really wants us to partner with them to streamline their shipping process"... fab if you sell logistics consultants for a huge margin, not great if you actually sell cardboard boxes, and your 'consultant' is the already overstretched head of product distribution
• "Great conversation with Acme corp, their Head of HR wants to do a free trial of our app with his entire Spanish arm. He needs to see it for real so we need to deploy it properly, but after that, we can roll it out everywhere!"... I wonder how many people they have in their Spanish arm, and what happens when you want to stop.
• "Great conversation with Acme corp, their CEO said she'll come to our event in Barbados in person! She's even bringing her partner!"... She either really wants to work with you, or she wants a free vacation.

In general, despite the adage to the contrary, customers are smart, and if they get value from your propellant, they will keen taking it! You had better have a darn good plan for ensuring they also buy the payload! They are also well-aware of the sunk-cost-fallacy... Caveat venditor!

*Probably much less cool for the earth worms who never asked to be sent into space