The salesman and the developer

So the real-world analogy would be that the developer is setting up an architecture (which performs similar to a camp - as a staging point for reaching goals), and the business guy brings in a client that then...what? Destroys the architecture? Invalidates it in some way?

It doesn't follow. A better analogy would be that the developer is digging a pit to catch a bear in, and the business guy finds a bear that's too big to fit into the hole. In that case, you have an instance where no one is at fault and there's simply an unshared assumption about the limits of how big the bear can and can't be.

But that doesn't make for as exciting of a blog post.

This is where a huge amount of the rub between sales-marketing and dev comes in. But this "imagine all the possibilities" type of stuff is pure crack in the sales-customer relationship.

So I try to fill the void for the sales guys so they won't be making stuff up on their own. That is, I take a lot of care/explaining to them what are some of the near term possibilities of our app that we haven't built out yet, but make sense, that sort of thing, how much it would cost, risk factors, etc.

Fill up their fantastical story buffer in advance w/stuff that is acceptable to me. This seems to work well with little friction because sales guys tend to be a lot less intransigent than devs/designers about features - basically, they care less about the substance of the story rather than simply how well it sells.

In short, I try to make my fantasies their fantasies as well.

Dropping an swaddled and basketed infant sale on the programmer's doorstep is not what sales is about.

You can build a product but until you manage to sell your product to someone, it's not a company.

'Salesmen' are not the only way to get people to buy your product.

I think it's important to start making a distinction between sales and marketing. At one place I worked, the marketing team resented being lumped in with sales and were actually in direct competition with them: organic signups nibbled away at a salesperson's commission.

People are becoming more comfortable with the idea of purchasing a product without ever having spoken to a human being in the entire sales cycle, and that's a marketing job. For some companies, it obviates the need for 'sales'.

Having made that distinction, I would not go to war, so to speak, without a great marketer by my side. A salesperson, on the other hand...

The problem with traditional sales is the pay structure. For mediocre salesmen, working on a commission means "any warm body will do as long as they don't churn before I get paid". This translates into having problematic customers who will thrash and cause you grief before inevitably cancelling your service or returning your product.