On one large service proposal, the commercial pressure was clear.
The opportunity mattered. The client's requirements were demanding. The proposed solution was shaped to meet them.
On paper, it worked.
Operationally, it would have pushed the delivery teams extremely hard.
The proposal could be sold. Delivering it consistently would have required the organisation to absorb strain that was not obvious in the commercial story.
That experience stayed with me because the logic behind it was understandable.
Competitive proposals create pressure to say yes. Teams look for ways to meet what the client wants. Optimistic assumptions become easier to accept when the prize is worth winning.
The cost tends to appear later.
I think of the distance between what the buyer believes has been promised and what the organisation can repeatedly support as the promise gap.
The contract can move the problem downstream
Once a strong promise helps close the deal, the organisation has to make it real.
That can mean extra effort from Delivery. Assumptions that sounded manageable during solutioning become operating constraints. Teams create workarounds because disappointing the client is worse. Expectations have to be clarified after the fact.
In other situations, Customer Success may inherit the same problem months later because the buyer's definition of success is broader than the product or service can reliably influence.
The symptoms appear in different teams, which makes the underlying problem easy to miss.
Sales may see Delivery being overly cautious. Delivery may see an unrealistic commercial commitment. Leadership sees margin pressure, strained teams, implementation issues or a difficult customer.
When several of those symptoms trace back to the same expectation created before the contract was signed, the promise itself deserves examination.
Find where the promise gets repaired
One of the quickest ways to locate a promise gap is to look for recurring repair work.
Useful questions include:
- Which promises regularly need clarification after the sale?
- Where are conditions added later that were not obvious earlier?
- Which outcomes does the customer expect even though the organisation only partly controls them?
- Where does Delivery add effort that was never fully accounted for?
- Which claims make the people responsible for delivery uncomfortable when they see them written down?
These are worth comparing across Sales, Delivery and Customer Success.
If different teams independently point towards the same promise, there is probably something more fundamental to investigate.
In the service proposal I mentioned earlier, the pressure was visible during solutioning. The operating model was being stretched to fit the commercial requirement.
That is an important moment because leadership still has a choice.
The opportunity may justify the stretch.
But the operating cost should be visible when that decision is made.
How far does the promise travel beyond what we know?
A related problem appears in commercial claims.
A product removes a manual activity. That creates a reasonable expectation of time savings. Time savings may improve productivity. Better productivity may contribute to lower cost or stronger operating performance.
The connections are plausible.
They are also progressively larger claims.
A useful way to test one important promise is to map:
- the outcome the buyer believes they are being promised;
- the part of the product or service expected to produce it;
- the evidence showing what has actually happened;
- the result that can be measured directly;
- the extent to which the organisation can reasonably connect itself to the larger outcome.
The purpose is to identify where direct evidence gives way to assumption.
That boundary matters commercially. It gives Sales a clearer view of what can be said confidently now and shows the business what it would need to establish before making a stronger promise later.
Three responses are usually available
Once the gap is visible, the business has a few sensible options.
Where the evidence and delivery model already support the claim, keep it and make the relevant proof easier for Sales and buyers to find.
Where the outcome depends on identifiable conditions, qualify the language so those conditions are clear without stripping away the commercial value.
And where a stronger promise would genuinely help the business but the evidence is not there yet, treat that as something to prove. Decide what needs to be measured, observed or documented before the organisation earns the right to make the stronger claim confidently.
That last option matters because evidence discipline can create ambition as well as restraint. A valuable outcome that cannot yet be claimed confidently may be telling the organisation what it should learn next.
Leadership decides how much stretch is acceptable
The large proposal also taught me something about commercial stretch.
Businesses sometimes choose difficult work because the client matters, the opportunity opens a market, the economics justify the effort or the team believes it can build a new capability.
Those can be rational decisions.
The important part is making the stretch deliberate.
A leadership team should understand the operating consequences before the promise reaches the contract. It should know which assumptions are carrying the solution, where the pressure will appear and what happens if those assumptions prove optimistic.
Once the buyer signs, the language stops being hypothetical.
Delivery experiences it as work.
That is why I would treat the promise gap as a commercial-management problem rather than a copy problem.
The strongest promise is the one the organisation is prepared to stand behind once it becomes operating reality.
That gives the buyer a clearer expectation, gives delivery a more workable commitment and gives leadership a better chance of being pleased with the deal long after it closes.