Dirty deals

Do you have standard terms of service your customers sign when they purchase from you?

Customers will often push back on these terms. Desperate to get the deal done, you or your colleagues hastily agree to those pushbacks. You’re either unaware of the implications or you’d rather let your future self handle them.

This is a problem because standard terms allow you to make the same assumptions about your contracts. When you deviate from those standard terms, you have to treat each contract individually.

The result?

Every future decision that might affect a customer now requires checking against every single contract instead of just one template for your standard terms.

Either you check each contract each time, which means you take on a massive administrative burden. Or you accept much greater contractual risk, which across enough customers you are pretty much guaranteed to have to pay for... under less-than-ideal circumstances.

Doing dirty things to get deals done is just part of the game. It’s not going away. The best action you can take is to figure out how to manage those deviations rather than hope they don’t happen.