A founder said this to me about his own company: "we've been lying to our sales guys about what we can deliver."
It sounds like the most accountable sentence anybody in that building had said out loud. He's naming a problem, he's putting it on himself, and he's doing it without being asked.
Read it again and watch where it puts the sales team.
In the victim seat. Next to the customer.
The reps were lied to. The customers were lied to. Everybody in the story was deceived by somebody, and the somebody is abstract enough that the sentence never lands on a person. It's an alibi wearing a confession costume.
Why nobody ever finds out
The structure underneath it is timing.
Commission lands at signature. Consequence lands 60 to 90 days later, in a different department, in front of a different person. By then the money's been spent and the rep is three deals into the next month.
Nobody in that chain ever experiences themselves as the person who sold something that doesn't work. They experience themselves as someone who happened to be between offers when the last one got weird.
That's not a personality flaw and it isn't unique to bad companies. It's what happens when the feedback arrives at an address the decision-maker doesn't live at. The seat that made the trade cannot see the trade, so the trade keeps getting made.
The part the alibi needs
Here's where I stop being generous about it.
A rep in month six has heard the same thing on call after call. "It's not working." "This isn't what I was sold." "When does the thing start?"
The information was available. It arrived every day, in the customer's own voice, through a channel nobody had to build.
So at some point "I was told we could deliver this" stops describing what you were told and starts describing what you were willing to keep not knowing.
Which means the founder's sentence is wrong in an interesting way. He didn't build a lie. A lie is a thing you have to maintain, and this maintained itself.
What he built was a permission structure. An arrangement where continuing to not know was the profitable thing to do, and where nobody had to make a decision about it, ever.
The version with a date on it
The cleanest example I've seen recently doesn't imply an end date. It writes one into the contract. A guaranteed outcome, a number, a window, and a refund if it isn't hit.
Guarantees aren't the problem. A guarantee is the cleanest risk reversal there is, and if you can produce the thing, put it in writing.
The question is whether you control what you're guaranteeing.
If everything needed to produce the result sits inside your company, you're guaranteeing that you'll do what you said. Fail and you genuinely failed. That's a real promise and it's worth what it costs you.
If the result depends on things you don't control, you've guaranteed something else. You've guaranteed the customer's own capability, their market, their timing, and some luck.
Say the promise is a number of leads. The leads arrive. Now somebody has to work them, and that somebody has frequently spent an entire career on referrals and warm introductions. Cold and warm are different jobs requiring different skills. The leads land, nothing converts, and both parties stare at the same number.
At day 91 that customer has no result. And any customer who does have one got lucky, because nothing in the arrangement was built to produce it reliably.
You didn't reverse the risk. You put a date on it.
Because now every customer on that contract has one. Not a vague sense of when they'll evaluate. A date. And on that date they aren't asking whether this is going well in general. They're asking one question with a number attached, and the answer is either yes or it's a refund.
An end date reframes everything before it. The customer stops using the thing and starts assessing it. They were going to give you a year of ordinary imperfect adoption and now they're giving you ninety days of evidence-gathering.
The people who wrote that clause will not be in the room on day 91. That's the whole mechanism in one sentence.
The test
There's a simple way to check whether an offer is built on consequence lag rather than on capability.
Would anyone run this play if the refund landed the same week as the commission?
Not the same quarter. The same week. Same person, same paycheck, both events visible at once.
Nobody would. Not because they'd suddenly become honest, but because the trade would finally be legible. Right now the trade is real and invisible, and invisible trades get made forever because nothing in the system objects.
That's why "our sales team oversold it" is never the diagnosis. Your sales team sold exactly what the structure paid them to sell, on the timeline the structure paid them to sell it, and every one of them will tell you they were doing their job. They were.
What this actually costs
The obvious cost is the refund, and it isn't the expensive one.
The expensive one is that an account which leaves at day 91 never becomes an account. Whatever that customer was going to be worth over three years, you converted it into one payment and a chargeback, and you did it before they'd even finished onboarding.
Then the same offer goes out again next month, because nothing in the system recorded what happened. The refund sits in finance. The reason sits in a conversation nobody wrote down. The offer sits in the deck, unchanged, and the next rep sells it in good faith.
You can't fix that with better people. The people were fine.
Move the consequence closer to the decision, or accept that you'll keep making the same trade and keep being surprised by it.
And none of this is an argument for promising less. Guarantee the part you actually control. It closes just as well, and you get to keep the money.
All of which assumes you can deliver the thing in the first place. That isn't a caveat, it's the precondition. Every argument about growing an account is predicated on the first purchase working, and no amount of better structure survives a product that doesn't land. Fix that before you fix anything here.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.