Best ways to lose a customer

I  have been in the soft­ware busi­ness for ten years now.half of it as a devel­oper .,sit­ting in the office writ­ing code.and half of it as a pro­fes­sional services.sitting in the cus­tomer office writ­ing code.…..

my boss told me i had to fligh to a cus­tomer in 3 days.destination east­ern europe-slovenia.no problem.told my familiy to pre­pare and i started work­ing on this flight.the cus­tomer asked us to install a new core bank­ing solu­tiun we provide.at the end of the first day of preaper­a­tion i sent a half detaild doc­u­ment explain­ing the meet­ing activ­i­tyes we plan.there was state­ment there (in a 10 page word doc) that said “recom­man­da­tion of the hard­ware– a machine with.… that can sup­port up to 2000 work­ers”.

the next day the cus­tomer can­celled the pilot,why?the rea­son was he wasnt aware we need this kind of hard­ware and he thought we need a machine that sup­port up to 100.we told him 100 is good for us.No!if  we wrote 2000 than it can’t be 100 so the meet­ing is canceled.

my boss got angry but aftre think­ing clearly he under­stood the prob­lem wasnt in the statment,it just a funny akwad way of th prospect to say “no”.

3 years ago , i was asked to make an online meet­ing with a reseller com­pany in germany.i sent them the soft­eare with all relevent matri­als, did some online meet­ing with them.then they said they have some prospect they thing might be inter­ested with the soft­ware, but his cur­rently core bam­ing solu­tuon is based on web plat­forms and our inte­grated solu­tion wasnt that stable.i admit­ing we wer­ent that good at that time, but that does­nyt stop you from sell­ing right?

so, the reseller did noth­ing for weeks, only sent emi­als about what other com­po­nent is miss­ing once we sent him updated,we updated one request, he sent a another,that went for three months .by the end of it, we had a lot of new com­po­nents but the resller wasnt happy we solved his request;s so he even­tully said he cant work with us because.….…

one year ago, out of no were a resller in india con­tact us, telling he had strong con­nec­tions in the bank­ing erea.he asked to meet us in our offices and he will pay for the flight, accom­man­da­tion. so we said why not.he arrived, and indeed he was very ple­sent per­son, smart and under­stood all we teached him. then he went to india back.we never heared of him. apparntly, this was  one man show. there was not company,just a per­son who wanted to travel the world.

there are a lot of examples.it seems that cus­tomer that dont want to con­tinue work­ing with you cant say “no”.so they use al kind of meth­ods to make you under­stand they are not interested,just like in dat­ing game, you are respon­si­blle to cacth the hints.once you got them, than you can either stop per­su­ing or con­tinue like a real lover.most of the time we stop.there are other girls our there so why insist of one that dont like you?but what about com­pa­nys? do we really need to sop after we got the hints? are they nego­ti­at­ing or they are realy not interested?in a com­pete­tive mar­ket can we stop per­su­ing just because of hints or do we need to con­tinue until rhey tell us we yes/no?

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