Sales leadership · 2 min read

Closing Is a Promise

The deal is the easy part to count. What the customer gets afterwards is the part they remember.

July 2019: the first account after the handover

In April 2019 we closed a monthly SEO and content engagement with a home-services company. It was the first account we closed after a transition we had just made in the business.

The deal closed on 15 April. The account manager who would run it was not handed it until 19 May.

In July the customer cancelled. Their operations lead wrote that she could not justify the $7,500 they had spent so far, and that it seemed they had been “caught in the cross hairs of some kind of internal issue.” The account had sat for five weeks before anyone was running it, and the April work had not been done. May and June were delivered, but by then she was questioning what she had paid for, and she was unhappy with how relevant the last blog post was to her business.

My first reply to the team was:

This was the first account that we closed after the transition, so not sure why those deliverables were not done; pls advise

The content had come from an outside production partner. My second reply was about them:

If [they are] screwing up; that work shouldn’t make it to the customer

The customer does not know or care which of our partners wrote a weak post. She sees one company. Whatever a partner gets wrong, we either catch before it reaches her, or we own after it does.

June 2021: “try” and “I will”

Two years later the same kind of problem came up from the other side. A development partner had committed to sending me a follow-up after a call. It did not arrive.

When I raised it, the answer was that he had only said he would try. I wrote back that it had started as a “try” and ended up as a commitment, “I will”, after I had asked for it to be sent that day:

At the end of the day, the key is to not just commit unless we can hit that timeline - that’s all I am trying to convey.

I added that this was not about me. I was a lot more forgiving because I knew them. It was about the potential customer experience, and that any commitments made to a potential client should be lived up to.

What the two have in common

In 2019 the sale itself went fine. What failed was the promise behind it: that the work would start in April. In 2021 the promise was smaller, a follow-up by the next day, and it still mattered enough to put in writing.

A customer judges you on those promises, not on how well the close went. Every handover, every partner and every “I’ll get back to you” is either a promise you keep or a reason for them to leave.