The Ministry of Silly Pitches
"You said: 'We’re the cloud, but on-prem, without the cloud… but with cloud economics.' What did the customer hear?"
What is “You have no idea what you’re saying, but it sounds expensive.”
"You open your call with 'I just wanted to touch base and see if you had any projects coming up.' What did the customer hear?"
What is “I have nothing valuable to offer you”?
"You told the customer our product includes VM-level snapshots. That’s the feature. What’s the advantage?"
What is 'It lets them restore specific VMs without rolling back the entire environment.'
"Customer says: ‘Performance is fine… we just reboot the VM when it slows down.’ What do you say?"
What is “Sounds like a Band-Aid for a bigger problem—let’s look at how Nutanix tracks and eliminates performance bottlenecks with I/O metrics and VM visibility.”
"What does 'Nutanix' actually mean? Like the word itself?"
What is “A play on ‘new’ and ‘tanix’ (a nod to Unix)—meant to sound like a next-gen OS.”
(And no, it’s not a vitamin supplement.)
"The customer asked about how Nutanix integrates with their backup software. The sales rep said, 'You’ll talk to the SE about that later.' What should the rep have done?"
What is “Give a basic answer or talk to enablement beforehand—don’t punt the question blindly.”
Customer says, 'I love the tech, but I can’t justify the cost to my CIO.' What do you present?"
What is “A clear ROI story or business case that speaks their language.”
"Customer proudly says their three-tier setup still works great. Their last upgrade took 9 months. What do you say?"
What is “That’s impressive—and probably exhausting. Let me show you what 9 hours looks like with Nutanix.”
Complete the pitch: We’re like the iPhone of infrastructure…
What is “...except it takes six weeks to activate and you need a whole IT team just to open the box.”
"Your prospect says, 'We’re not looking for anything right now,' and you respond with, 'Okay, I’ll check back in a few months.' What opportunity did you miss?"
What is the chance to ask, 'What would need to change for that to be worth revisiting sooner?'
"You listed a feature and the customer asked, 'So what?' What key step did you skip?"
What is 'Explaining the benefit in their context'?
"Customer: ‘We haven’t had an outage in months… just a few hiccups with storage.’ What’s the move?"
What is “Let’s talk about how Nutanix handles redundancy and self-healing, so hiccups don’t turn into heart attacks.”
"What was Nutanix’s first customer use case back in 2009?"
What is “VDI—Virtual Desktop Infrastructure.”
(And it’s still a strong use case today.)
The SE gave a killer demo but didn’t confirm business goals ahead of time. What did they skip?
What is “Aligning technical validation to customer outcomes—SEs need to understand the ‘why,’ not just the ‘how.’”
"The prospect is stuck in decision paralysis. They’ve seen the demo—what now?"
What is “A hosted proof of concept that maps directly to their key goals or metrics.”
They say, ‘We just bought a new SAN last year.’ What’s your play?
What is “That SAN’s solid—but when it’s time to scale or refresh, we can help you avoid forklift upgrades forever.”
"You told the customer 'We simplify everything,' and then opened a 38-tab demo. What did you just do?"
What is “Contradicted your value prop in real time.”
"True or false: Asking 'How are you?' before building any rapport is a good way to start a cold call."
What is false? (They know it’s fake. Cut to the value.)
"You said 'Prism has one-click upgrades.' What’s the benefit to a time-strapped IT admin?"
What is 'It reduces upgrade windows from hours to minutes, freeing up time for strategic work.
"Customer says: ‘DR? We’ve got a plan… somewhere.’ How do you respond?"
What is “Let’s run through a real DR simulation using Nutanix DR, and see how long it would take to bring services back online.”
"How many components must fail in a 3-node Nutanix cluster before there’s data loss?"
What is “More than one. Nutanix keeps at least two copies of data—so one node or disk can fail without data loss.”
"The customer is stuck on procurement, but the SE says, ‘That’s a sales problem.’ What’s wrong here?"
What is “Sometimes the SE is the trusted advisor who can unblock the deal with technical justification or urgency.”
"You’re told the deal is on hold for ‘next quarter.’ What question should you ask first?"
What is “What would need to change for this to be a priority now?”
Customer says, ‘We’ve got VMs on different hypervisors across 4 sites—it’s fine.’ You see chaos. How do you respond?
What is “That kind of complexity used to be the norm—today we can unify that mess and save you serious time.”
You compared Nutanix to flying cars. What’s the risk?"
What is “They’ll think we’re vaporware, not VMware.”
"You led with 'We’re a leader in hyperconverged infrastructure.' What does the customer assume next?"
What is 'This is a canned pitch, and I’m about to be bored.'
"Which of these is NOT a benefit?"
A) Faster provisioning
B) Save hours of manual setup
C) Improve deployment speed
D) LCM is now automated
What is D? (That’s a feature, not a benefit.)
"Customer: ‘We don’t need backup. We’ve never lost data.’ What do you show?"
What is “A demo of Nutanix’s built-in backup and snapshot features—because no one needs a seatbelt until the crash.”
"How does Nutanix handle silent data corruption?"
What is “Through end-to-end checksumming—data integrity checks occur automatically.”
(If you didn’t know we do this, now you do.)
"Sales owns the relationship, but the SE sees architecture going off the rails. What now?"
What is “Speak up—shared success means shared accountability.”
"The competition offered a cheaper quote. You’re getting ghosted. What angle do you take?"
What is “Highlight long-term cost of ownership, support experience, or risks of going cheap.”
They say, ‘Our backups work… mostly.’ You dig in and find daily failures. What do you say?
What is “It’s working—until it isn’t. Let’s test a restore together and make sure you’re truly protected.”
Your pitch was so vague it could’ve been for Nutanix or a new wellness app. What did you forget?"
What is “Tying the pitch to a real customer pain.”
"What's a better alternative to starting with your company intro?"
What is 'Opening with an insight or a pain point they’re likely facing'? (Ex: “I work with a lot of teams trying to reduce VM sprawl—does that sound familiar?”)
Complete this transformation:
Feature: Self-healing storage
Advantage: System detects and corrects disk failures automatically
Benefit: _______"
What is 'Reduced downtime and fewer 2 AM wake-up calls for the IT team.'
"Customer says: ‘Our admins are fine managing all these systems—at least we’ve got job security.’ Your angle?"
What is “True job security is when you’re not stuck putting out fires. Let’s demo how Prism simplifies daily operations so they can work smarter, not harder.”
What’s the default failure domain when you deploy Nutanix clusters across multiple racks?
What is “Rack awareness is enabled automatically—data is spread across racks to protect against rack-level failure.”
(If you said ‘I don’t know,’ you’re not alone.)
"The customer asked a pricing question and the SE said, ‘That’s not my role.’ What’s the better move?"
What is “Stay in your lane—but guide the conversation back to value or let the sales rep jump in with context.”
The Services Team throws in surprise contract language the day before signature. What do you do?"
What is “Call a deal review immediately—get sales, SE, legal, and leadership aligned fast.”
Customer is using a competitor who sold them a massive overbuild. You don’t want to trash-talk—how do you highlight the issue?
What is “Looks like they sized for peak everything. We focus on right-sizing for actual needs—with room to grow.”