The willingness to help a customer is often one of a service business's greatest strengths. A team adapts a proposal, finds a way around a difficulty and earns trust through its effort. Those decisions can be commercially sound and personally important to the people involved.
The difficulty begins when exceptions accumulate without anyone seeing their combined effect. Each promise looks manageable in isolation; together they can change the cost and complexity of running the business.
Make the exceptions visible
Review a small selection of recent contracts with sales and delivery colleagues. Ask what changed from the standard offer, who approved the change and how the extra work was reflected in scope and price.
For a managed service provider, an exception might involve a reporting commitment, an unsupported technology or a particular escalation arrangement. For a software business, it might be a customised onboarding process or an expectation about future development.
The question is whether the business understands and can support the commitment. An exception may be worthwhile, but it should be a deliberate choice.
Define where flexibility belongs
A useful proposition makes three things clear: what is included as standard, what can be tailored and what the business is not equipped to provide. This gives salespeople confidence to explore a request without either dismissing it too quickly or promising something they cannot confirm.
- Standard: the repeatable service and the assumptions on which its price depends.
- Tailored: changes that can be assessed, costed and approved before a commitment is made.
- Outside scope: work that needs a different provider, separate project or explicit decision about capability.
These boundaries should be understandable to customers. Explain the reason for a choice in terms of reliable delivery and clear expectations, rather than presenting an internal rule without context.
Bring delivery into the decision early
When a request affects capacity, support obligations or technical risk, involve the people who will fulfil it before the proposal is final. Their contribution can improve the offer as well as expose costs.
Keep the approval process proportionate. The aim is to make decisions easier and more consistent, with a clear route for significant exceptions. A process that forces every minor adjustment through the MD simply creates another bottleneck.
Review what the business is learning
Repeated requests for the same adaptation may reveal a valuable new service opportunity. They may also show that the current offer is being sold to customers it does not fit. Reviewing the pattern helps distinguish those possibilities.
Look at delivery effort, customer value and margin together. Where a tailored service works well and can be repeated, consider making it part of the proposition. Where it repeatedly causes difficulty, adjust the scope or the customers you pursue.
Thoughtful boundaries help people keep their promises. They allow a business to remain responsive while giving customers and colleagues a clearer understanding of what a good partnership looks like.
Expanded website edition of a post by Robbie Campbell. View the original LinkedIn post (opens in a new tab).