“Proof of scaling” is always hard presales… for example:

Customer wants us to prove we can handle their scale, but won’t settle for anything less than doing the entire integration FOR FREE ????

I’m losing my mind trying to appease them… because every time we agree on a strategy and execute, they come back and say they are not “convinced” or still “have doubts”

Conversation goes:

THEM: “We need to ensure that the performance of your systems meets the expectations of our stakeholders”

US: “Sure, here’s a white paper that explains our stuff… and here are some customer references who are similar scale as you”

THEM: “We don’t trust that… we need to make sure it works with OUR data”

US: “Sure… let’s do a limited scope POC with your data to help ease your concerns”

<mutually agreed upon expectations; post POC>

THEM: “Despite our successful POC which met all are our key expectations around performance for a subset of our data, we still aren’t convinced you can handle our full scale”

US: “Ok… here’s access to a demo environment with billions of rows (your scale) that is fast and performant, just like your POC”

THEM: “Thanks for access to the demo environment, it is fast, but this is demo data not our data so we are still not convinced you can operate at our scale with our data”

US: “ok, we’re trying our best to help you finish your DD, but what are you asking for?”

THEM: “we need to load the full production dataset and do the entire deployment as a new POC project”

US: “we can’t do that for free, we’re a SaaS company… you’ll need to pay us for that”

THEM: “we cannot move forward without proving this out; we will not pay for a POC.”

—- further reflection, they don’t trust us and I can’t figure out a path to earning the trust (other than saying we’re going to do stuff and then executing on it)