The message arrives on a Thursday afternoon. A large new customer goes live next month, and the account manager has forwarded their onboarding checklist. Item seven is automatic export to their accounting system. Your product does not do that. It has never done that. Somewhere in the sales process, somebody said it would.
Your first reaction will probably be irritation, and it is worth letting that pass before you write anything. How you handle the next two days matters more than how it happened.
Get the exact words first. Ask the account manager for the email, the slide or the contract clause where the promise was made. A line saying we can export to your accounting system might mean a CSV file once a month, which you may already have, or a live connection to one particular system, which you do not. People argue for days about a commitment none of them has actually read.
Then talk inside the company before anyone talks to the customer. Agree between sales, product and engineering what is true, what is possible and what it would cost. The customer should hear one story, not three.
Give options, not a verdict. Saying it cannot be done ends the conversation and leaves sales on their own. Saying what can be done by when gives them something to work with. The CSV export exists today. A scheduled export could be ready in three weeks. A direct connection would take a quarter and push back other work, which someone above both of you would need to decide.
Do not blame the salesperson in front of the customer, or in a channel with forty people in it. They were probably working from an old slide, a demo, or something an engineer once said casually. Find out which, because that is the thing to fix.
If you join the customer call, keep to what you know. Say clearly what the product does now, what is planned and roughly when, and what you would need to check. Never promise a date in the meeting just to make an awkward silence go away.
Afterwards, help close the gap. Offer to review the sales material once a quarter, or to be the person sales can ask before they say yes. A lot of overpromising happens simply because nobody technical was easy to check with.
– Asael Shinder
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