alt Hacker NewsI'm a dev, not a salesperson, but let's be realistic. A company tells you "yeah we're interested in signing at $1M/yr, but we really need this feature, when will you have it by?", to which saying "eh we don't know - it'll be done when it's done" will lead to the company saying "ok well reach out when you have it, we can talk again then" (or just "eh ok then not a good fit sorry bye"), and in the meantime they'll go shopping around and may end up signing with someone else.
Having a promised date lets you keep the opportunity going and in some cases can even let you sign them there and then - you sign them under the condition that feature X will be in the app by date Y. That's waaaay better for business, even if it's tougher for engineers.
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Just to consider the opposite viewpoint, I sometimes wonder if it's not better that they do churn in that case. Assuming the sales team is doing their job properly, there are other prospects who may not need that feature, and not ramming the feature in under time constraints will lead to a much better product. Eventually, their feature will be built, and it will have taken the time that it needed, so they'll probably churn back anyway, because the product from the vendor they did get to ram their feature in is probably not very good.
Unless its the first time they are hearing about it, when a customer asks about a feature, sales should've done their homework and checked with the team doing the work to get a rough estimate instead of pulling a number out of their behinds.
“Sign up and pay at least part of it now and we’ll prioritize the feature”.
I’ve seen enough instances of work being done for a specific customer that doesn’t then result in the customer signing up (or - once they see they can postpone signing the big contract by continuing to ask for “just one more crucial feature”, they continue to do so) to ever fall for this again.