Comments on: Friday Q&A: How far should you go to land that BIG customer?

By: Jon Birdsong

Jon Birdsong — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:21:12 +0000

Alex, Great post. I really enjoyed it. I would like to propose a question: what percentage of your leads come through your content marketing efforts and what come through the viral nature of your product?

Thank you!

By: Andrew Rogoff

Andrew Rogoff — Mon, 27 Jun 2016 14:02:37 +0000

On a related topic, we got a questionnaire from a huge potential customer the other day. We get them all the time but this one literally took an entire day to complete. We were close to declining to fill it in. Alex, do you get these types of questionnaire? Do you have any thoughts on how to deal with them?

By: Harshad Bhagwat

Harshad Bhagwat — Sat, 25 Jun 2016 09:20:00 +0000

Incidentally, I am going through the same at the moment. A dream client is asking us to do something which doesn’t fall into our core business. It was tough to stand my ground. I agreed to do the side project. Finally, they also gave the project which we wanted and introduced me to two more prospective clients. It depends on the how trustworthy the client is.

By: Justin B

Justin B — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 22:40:07 +0000

Hey Alex, this post feels especially relevant to me today. Various teams at a Fortune 500 company (one of the top 50) have been using Prefinery for months and they have been pushing for us to onboard as a “vendor”, threatening to leave if we don’t follow through. While landing a $1k+/mo account (very possibly much more, but, at the same time, possibly less if they simply cancel a few months in) is very tempting, I’m just getting an uneasy feeling. The process is complex, spanning their procurement, legal, and product departments. It’s a world of purchase orders, which are added time on our end to create using their proprietary system as well as frustrating in terms of collecting payment (NET 60 or NET10-2%). The legal side is downright scary — indemnity clauses, insurance requirements, audits, and even giving them rights to source code in case of breach of contract — and filled with added time and cost as lawyers go back and forth on negotiating their standard terms. My head is telling me to move forward and my gut telling me to run away from the deal. While I’m not customizing the product for them, I would be customizing the purchasing process, and suspect that I would be taking on considerable legal risk. Have you (or anyone else reading in the SaaS world) encountered something similar?

By: John Pettigrew

John Pettigrew — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 15:45:40 +0000

I don’t disagree, but do have one counterpoint to make: don’t be distracted by those big customers – but don’t refuse to listen, either. One can never be sure where the true market opportunity for your business actually is, and customers are the only ones who can ultimately show you that.

There’s a balance between having confidence in your idea and being open to changing your approach to suit the market realities.

By: Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson — Fri, 24 Jun 2016 15:37:02 +0000

What I’ve found works is this:

The Internet is filled with horror stories that talk about companies making accommodations. Exactly what will you do to prevent that from happening to us?

That’s aggressive for sure, but it reframes the questions.