Part of selling "the product" is exactly "selling the dream". How boring is it when I sit down to try and sell somebody something and start rattling off lists of detailed technical specifications:
Well, this is built on the JVM, using Groovy and Grails, and implements all the relevant technical standards, including Atom 1.0, RSS 1.0, WSDL 2.0, SOAP 1.13, GRDDL 11.9, FOAF 1.0, RuleML, SWRL, OAGIS, and UMBEL, and it has great features, like application integration over JMS, FTP, REST, SOAP and AMQ using Camel and an Enterprise Service Bus, and there's an Integrated Activity Stream using the activitystrea.ms protocol, and did I mention that you can make semantic assertions and store them in RDF using Jena and then query them using SPARQL...
are you asleep yet? No? Well most customers eyes would have glazed over after about the second acronym.
OTOH, what about:
Are you worried about how your company will survive, and the legacy you will leave behind? Nobody wants to be known as "CEO of a company that went bankrupt". The thing is, you have a ton of potential here, you just need a way to unleash it. Imagine if... all of your employees were enabled to easily and conveniently share, transfer, remix and create knowledge, based on their experiences and the experiences of their co-workers. Imagine if innovations developed in the R&D labs made it into new, profitable product lines 5x faster than they do now. Imagine if you had the ability to have your whole company sense important signals from the environment you operate in, and react to those signals in a agile, adaptive manner.. never letting a competitor get the jump on you, and serving new customer needs before even the customer realizes them. Wouldn't that be a nice thing, Mr. CEO? Yeah? Well then great, we have some gnarly knowledge management and collaboration products that I'd like to tell you about...
Of course, if you really want to get tricky, throw in some NLP "time distortion" pattern language:
You know, Mr. CEO, in five years, when your company is more profitable than ever, and you've won the State Chamber of Commerce "CEO of the Year" award, you're going to look back on today and see that this was the beginning of a very beneficial partnership, aren't you?
