Were there times where you had to say no to a big potential contract that was asking you to solve for something on the periphery of those ~10% corner cases?
Is there ever a time you think that could be worth it?
Or maybe there is some alternative where you negotiate such a contract to keep things in your company's wheelhouse without building all sorts of edge cases?
Often when dealing with corner cases, you need to show prospects two things:
1. their corner case is very unlikely
2. if it ever happens, there is an "escape valve" that enables then to deal with it. It might be a manual process, a low-level API, a drop-down to some lower-level tool etc.
Some will back-off at that point and admit it's unlikely, or they just wanted to understand what would be required. And in other cases, you just need to let the customer know this is where we stand, we hope you'll still work with us, but if not, we understand.
You also need a way to deal with feature requests. There were many times at Duo and Zendesk when very big deals came in with a lot of hair on them. I said the deals had to be approved by Product for us to take them. That meant, the feature being requested was already on the roadmap or it was something that we knew would come up in the next dozen Enterprise customers. Otherwise, if it was a one-off, not likely to be repeated, the answer was no.
That said, we were never in a stage where we thought we might not be able to make payroll etc. In such circumstances, I would be a bit more flexible.
Were there times where you had to say no to a big potential contract that was asking you to solve for something on the periphery of those ~10% corner cases?
Is there ever a time you think that could be worth it?
Or maybe there is some alternative where you negotiate such a contract to keep things in your company's wheelhouse without building all sorts of edge cases?
Often when dealing with corner cases, you need to show prospects two things:
1. their corner case is very unlikely
2. if it ever happens, there is an "escape valve" that enables then to deal with it. It might be a manual process, a low-level API, a drop-down to some lower-level tool etc.
Some will back-off at that point and admit it's unlikely, or they just wanted to understand what would be required. And in other cases, you just need to let the customer know this is where we stand, we hope you'll still work with us, but if not, we understand.
You also need a way to deal with feature requests. There were many times at Duo and Zendesk when very big deals came in with a lot of hair on them. I said the deals had to be approved by Product for us to take them. That meant, the feature being requested was already on the roadmap or it was something that we knew would come up in the next dozen Enterprise customers. Otherwise, if it was a one-off, not likely to be repeated, the answer was no.
That said, we were never in a stage where we thought we might not be able to make payroll etc. In such circumstances, I would be a bit more flexible.