[RickDT]

This was the biggest "oh crap, what did we do to ourselves?" moment. Effectively saying "no" took us off those people's radars permanently.

[graeme]

Have you tried recontacting them? A lot of people are open to a sincere mea culpa announcing a policy change. I suspect you'll win back more than 0% of those clients, on good terms.

[svmegatron]

This is great advice, AND it dovetails nicely with the advice I've been seeing here a lot lately: send more email to prospective customers :-)