A fast solution to stopping missed deadlines in your sales team

The team is about to miss another deadline. It’s not that they are not responsible or spend their day watching cat videos; it’s just that their delivery muscle is weak. They’re not delivering what is promised in the time that it is promised.

If this is something you experience in your team, I have a solution for you. Bring the team together and ask them not to change the delivery date. You have two options; extend the delivery date, buy yourself more time and finish what is promised or keep the deadline and ask the team what can be delivered that is still of value to the customer.

The moment you ask this question, you’re going to get at least one of the following objections:

Obligation

“We are obliged to deliver everything that is in scope”. True. We are not saying to keep the deadline and still complete everything by this date as we know that is not possible. What we are suggesting is to keep the deadline, deliver what is possible, and continue after the first release.

Incomplete

“It is incomplete; we can’t put it in front of the customer”. Your guidance should be that by the deadline polish what can be completed and release those. Prioritise the essential items for release.

Time

“The time required to remove the incomplete parts is more than actually completing it all. This one is the most common, particularly in software delivery or technical solutions. I want you to encourage modular thinking. Deliver the first part, release it, receive feedback, re-prioritise and repeat the process for the next pieces. If your team gets into this habit, you will develop constant and continuous delivery.

By keeping the deadline but removing or reducing the scope, you achieve two things. Firstly your delivery muscle gets more robust, the team learns to do less and promise less. Instead, they will complete something and promise more after that.

Secondly, your customers will respect this approach more. They understand what has been promised; they know what you are capable of. Everybody can observe and appreciate when people can keep to their word.

Your customers will, of course, see that the product is incomplete, but they will see your team’s race to complete as much as they can, to deliver something for their feedback while simultaneously working towards phase two in the background. This will help your customer still believe that they can rely on you.

Keep the deadline and ask what can be removed and what can be delivered by the deadline.

If this is your team try it, and let me know the results. Teach it to your leadership team. Over time, teams will start asking the right questions internally, “We’re going to miss the deadline but what is it that we can ship, deliver and release? What can we schedule for right after the first release?”.

I learned these methods from the Agile framework. It is the concept of continuous delivery and continuous feedback, getting into the habit of time-boxing to deliver big time-consuming projects or products.

Shirin Danesh is founder of Momentum Pipeline a program designed to make top-tier consulting practices in Agile transformation accessible to a wider range of companies. She invites sales leaders to improve one challenging but rewarding metric — Funnel Velocity. She is an Executive Agile Coach, working with futuristic, caring and ambitious executives to level-up their business. You can get her 90-Day plan on Agile transformation in sales pipelines here