"A Culture of Failing to Keep Promises" Is a Sales Problem

An investor just described a company's problem in a way that should make every sales leader flinch. Talking about Sapiens after Advent took it over, Mike Ettling called out "a poor culture of failing to keep promises." Read that again. Not a product gap. Not a market shift. A culture of promising things the company did not deliver.

That culture does not start in delivery. It starts in sales. And it is more common than any founder wants to admit.

The quota made them do it

Here is how a company learns to break promises. A rep is short of quota with a week left in the quarter. The deal on the table needs one more yes. So the rep promises the feature that is on the roadmap but not built. Promises the timeline that engineering never agreed to. Promises the integration, the SLA, the custom work, whatever it takes to get the signature before the clock runs out.

The deal closes. The number is hit. Everyone celebrates. Then the invoice becomes a liability, because now the company owes something it cannot deliver, to a customer who signed specifically because of the thing it cannot deliver.

Do that a hundred times and you have built exactly what Ettling described. A culture where the promise is a closing tactic and delivery is somebody else's problem. The sales team learns that overselling gets rewarded, so they do more of it. The rot is structural, not personal.

Overselling is the most expensive revenue you can book

A deal closed on a promise you cannot keep is worse than no deal. A lost deal costs you the deal. An oversold deal costs you the implementation hours, the support escalations, the customer success team burning weeks trying to save it, the reference you will never get, the churn when the customer leaves angry, and the review they write on the way out.

That revenue shows up green on the board this quarter and red everywhere else for the next two years. It is the most expensive revenue a company can book, and a quota plan that only measures bookings will produce more of it every single quarter.

Fix the comp, fix the culture

People do what they are paid to do. If you pay only for the signature, you get signatures at any cost, including promises nobody can keep. The fix is not a values poster. It is compensation and process.

Pay for revenue that sticks, not just revenue that closes. Tie a meaningful part of the plan to retention and successful onboarding, so a rep who oversells and churns the account feels it in their own pay.

Put a hard wall between what sales can promise and what the company can deliver. Roadmap items are not sellable until they ship. Custom commitments get signed off by the people who have to build them, before the deal closes, not after.

Measure promise accuracy. Track how often what was sold matches what got delivered. When the gap is wide, you have found your churn before it finds you.

This is a core part of what I build as a fractional CRO and when I am building a sales team from the ground up: a motion where the rep's incentive is aligned with the customer's success, not opposed to it. Get that wrong and you can grow fast for a year, right up until the promises come due.

Sapiens is now somebody else's reset to run. The lesson is free for everyone else. The promises your sales team makes to close this quarter are the liabilities your company carries next year. Sell what you can deliver, or spend years paying for what you could not.