The big red sales button

time to read 2 min | 339 words

imageI used the term “Big Red Sales Button” in a previous post, and got a question about it. You can see an illustration of that on the right.

The Big Red Sales Button (BRSB from now on) is a metaphor used to discuss how sales can impact an organization. It is common for the sales team to run into new customer requirements. Some of them are presented as absolute requirements (they usually aren’t).

I have found that the typical response of the sales person at this point is to reply “of course we can do that”, go back to the office and hit the BRSB and notify the dev team that they have $tooShortTimeFrame to implement said feature.

In one very memorable case, I remember going over contract details and trying to figure out what we need to do there. Right there, in a minimum seven figures contract, there was a clause that explained what the core functionality of the system and the set of features that were required for it to be accepted.

Most of it was pretty normal business application, nothing too strange. But section 5.1.3.c was interesting. In it, in dense legalese, there was a requirement to solve the traveling salesman problem. To be fair, it wasn’t actually that problem, it was a scheduling problem and I used the traveling salesman as the name for it because it is easier than trying to explain NP complete issues to layman.

I’ll spoil the ending of this post and reveal that I did not solve an NP complete problem. I cheated like hell and actually solved the issue they had (if you limit the solution space, you drastically simplify the cost of a solution).

Sometimes, the BRSB is used for a good purpose. If you have something that can help close a major sale, and it isn’t outrageous to implement it, for example. But in many cases, it is open for abuse.