The person who can see what a customer actually needs is almost never the person who can staff it.
That's the whole problem, and it's structural rather than anybody's fault. Proximity is what produces an accurate read on what a customer requires. Distance is where the authority to allocate people sits. Those two things live in different bodies, and they're rarely in contact at the moment a commitment gets made.
So the promise gets made by somebody with the visibility to know it's right and no ability to make it possible.
It's rarely as casual as it sounds
The word promise makes this sound like a throwaway line on a call, something said warmly and forgotten.
It isn't. It ends up in writing. It's in the proposal, because the proposal is where you describe what working with you is like. It's in the agreement, because the agreement is where that description gets specific enough to sign. It's in whatever the customer was told to expect during the first ninety days, which they wrote down, and which they will measure you against for the rest of the relationship.
Somewhere in your signed contracts there are commitments to a cadence of contact that nobody has been assigned to deliver. Not because anybody was careless. Because the person who wrote them was describing what good looks like, accurately, from the only vantage point where good is visible.
This is not overselling
Worth separating, because the two get treated identically and they have opposite fixes.
Overselling is promising something that shouldn't be promised. The thing doesn't exist, or it exists and won't work for this customer, and the person promising it either knows that or didn't check. The fix is qualification, discipline, and occasionally a different salesperson.
This is promising the correct thing into an organization that can't do it. The read was right. The customer does need that. The company just has no mechanism to produce it at the volume that's now been committed to.
Treat the second one like the first and you'll spend a year coaching accuracy into somebody who was already accurate, while the actual shortfall goes on running.
A capacity decision made by somebody who wasn't allowed to make it
Here's the version that should bother you.
Every commitment written into an agreement is a capacity decision. It obligates hours. It says a certain number of people will do a certain thing on a certain rhythm for the duration of the contract, and that's a staffing question whether or not anybody staffed it.
Those decisions are getting made continuously, in writing, by people who have no budget authority, no visibility into the delivery bench, and no way to know how many identical commitments were made this quarter by their colleagues.
Nobody would design that. It happens because a proposal is a sales document in every system you own, and a requisition in none of them.
The fix isn't to stop the promises
They're usually accurate descriptions of what good would look like, produced by the people best positioned to see it, and getting rid of them wouldn't improve delivery, it would just make you slower to find out.
Treat them as requisitions instead.
That means two changes, and neither is a process document. The first is that commitments to ongoing delivery get read by somebody who staffs things, before signature, not because they need approval but because they need to be counted. The second is that the count goes somewhere. If forty agreements this quarter promised a monthly touch that nobody is assigned to, that is a hiring number, and right now it isn't reaching anybody who hires.
What you find when you count
Two useful things, and one uncomfortable one.
You find out what your delivery model actually is, as described by the people who see customers, rather than as described in a doc written by people who don't.
You find out where the gap is, in hours rather than in sentiment, which is the only form anybody can act on.
And you find out that the shortfall has been running for a while, covered by somebody, at no cost to any budget you can see. That's the uncomfortable one, and it's also the reason none of this ever showed up as a problem before now.
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.