“Sales and product are aligned.”
Sales knows the roadmap. Product briefs the team quarterly. Enablement materials are current. The story we tell the market is the story product is building.
You sold the roadmap. The customer bought a commitment.
The feature was “on the roadmap” when you demoed it. The customer heard “coming soon.” Product meant “under consideration.” Six months later, the customer is asking where it is and you’re the one taking the call. You didn’t lie. The roadmap wasn’t a lie either. The gap between what sales can say and what product will commit to is where your credibility lives — and it’s getting wider.
When “on the roadmap” means different things to sales and product, the customer pays for the gap.
“We have a smooth handoff from sales to delivery.”
Deals move from sales to implementation seamlessly. The onboarding process is defined. Customer success picks up where sales leaves off.
You closed it. Then the customer disappeared into a queue.
You spent three months building the relationship. The deal closed Friday. Monday, the customer was assigned a ticket number and entered a 6-week implementation queue. The context you built — their urgency, their politics, what they actually need versus what they signed — none of it transferred. The handoff process exists. What it hands off is a contract, not a relationship.
When the handoff transfers the contract but not the context, the customer starts over with a company that already knows them.
“We’re flexible with deal structure.”
Custom pricing shows we value the relationship. We meet customers where they are. Flexibility is a competitive advantage.
Every deal is custom. Nobody knows what standard looks like anymore.
You have 200 active contracts. No two have the same terms. Legal reviews every renewal because none of them match the template. Finance can’t forecast because the pricing model has 47 variations. What started as “let’s be flexible for the big accounts” became the operating model. Your standard deal is the exception now. And every new rep learns that the fastest way to close is to invent a new structure.
When every deal is custom, you don’t have a pricing model. You have 200 pricing models.
“We hit our number.”
Revenue target achieved. Pipeline is healthy. Win rate is up. The team is performing. The board is pleased.
You hit the number. The quality of what you sold is someone else’s problem.
The quarter closed strong. But 30% of those deals included commitments that haven’t been scoped. Two enterprise accounts signed on expectations the product can’t meet yet. The churn from last year’s aggressive close is hitting this quarter’s renewals. You optimized for the number you’re measured on. The cost shows up on someone else’s dashboard, two quarters from now.
When the close metric is celebrated but the delivery metric is someone else’s problem, the organization is borrowing from its own future.
“Our customers trust us.”
Relationships are strong. Renewals are steady. Account managers know their clients. Trust is earned through years of partnership.
They renew because switching costs are high. That’s not trust. That’s inertia.
Your largest account hasn’t taken an upsell call in a year. They renew because migrating would cost more than staying. The relationship isn’t strong — it’s calcified. They’ve stopped asking for more because they stopped believing you’d deliver it. The revenue looks stable. The relationship underneath it is hollow. And when a competitor makes switching easy, you won’t get a warning. You’ll get a cancellation.
When customers renew without engaging, the revenue is real but the relationship is already gone.
Every lens sees the same system. Shared language is how the system starts to learn.
These aren’t failures of people. They’re the physics of organizations operating at scale and speed.