Sales Commitments 101

Aside from annual performance reviews, this is everyone's least favorite topic. And by everyone I really do mean everyone involved from the sales leader who has to land the contract, to the product manager, the development team, senior leadership and even, eventually, the prospect (when the commitment is delivered late and/or incomplete).

It's a reality of B2B products that sometimes development commitments need to be made in order to land a customer. The stakes are high: don't make the commitment, potentially lose the deal. Make the commitment but fail to deliver, have an upset customer who has is already in an "expectations hole". Despite this being a reality with such high stakes, most companies are horrible at managing this aspect of their business.

The fundamental issue is that it strains the relationship between product development and sales because it seemingly pits their respective motivations against each other: sales needs to land customers (revenue) whereas product development needs to properly deliver on commitments made.

As a product leader, I've always invested in building trust based relationships with sales. This allows for a low-friction but scalable and repeatable process to be made to truly support sales commitments with the full weight of the product development organization so that commitments can be reliably fulfilled.

Product people need to be allowed by sales and trained by the product leader to interact with prospects to do discovery without jeopardizing the sale. Some sales people would never let their product people close to a prospect for fear of raising doubts which scuttle the deal. When done correctly by a properly trained product manager, the prospect comes away impressed that this is an organization that wants to understand their needs and is serious about solving them.

Likewise, engineering teams need to be nimble in supporting these requests and accept that even with this process there still will be more unknowns than everyone would ideally like for a commitment. There is no "perfect" to be had here... but it will be immeasurably better than "commit first and ask questions later".

The above formula is how you get to what SVPG calls "High Integrity Commitments" where sales, product, development, and most importantly, the new customer have their expectations more aligned regarding a delivery commitment that now has a much higher chance for success.