That was part of the problem: the sales people couldn't push back on most requests because they were often quite reasonable. When they were more demanding, it was usually from a large prospective buyer so we had to bend over backwards.
The result was that we had huge tasks to do with no (current) revenue, and small tasks to do that took 10x as long as they should have. Since servicing existing revenue streams (even on reasonable requests) became so time-consuming, handling big enterprise demands became totally untenable.
We needed a lot of things. Better (or more technical) sales was one. More mid-level engineers was another. Mostly, though, we just needed more time or money.
Our target market was very reluctant to moving from a paper system to a software system, so there was a lot of foot-dragging and feature requests. That delay had just never been budgeted into schedules or runway.
That was part of the problem: the sales people couldn't push back on most requests because they were often quite reasonable. When they were more demanding, it was usually from a large prospective buyer so we had to bend over backwards.
The result was that we had huge tasks to do with no (current) revenue, and small tasks to do that took 10x as long as they should have. Since servicing existing revenue streams (even on reasonable requests) became so time-consuming, handling big enterprise demands became totally untenable.