Setting Expectations Before the Sale

If you accept the behavior of others you also accept it within yourself.

I wrote that about life, but every owner meets it in business. The first time you let a customer add “one small thing” for free, you have taught them how the relationship works. The second time, you have taught yourself. By the tenth, it is simply how you run the company.

Expectations get set, or not set, before the sale, long before the customer is upset. Every surprise a customer feels on day three of a project was an expectation that nobody spoke out loud on day zero. The cost of those surprises lands on your margin as well as your reputation.

What a customer is really buying

A customer buying from you is holding a picture in their head of how it will go. You have a different picture in yours. The distance between those two pictures is where complaints, discounts and unpaid invoices grow. Setting expectations is the work of putting your picture on paper and asking the customer to put theirs beside it.

Say a contractor quotes a $4,000 job (a labelled hypothetical) that leaves $1,200 in profit after labor and materials. During the work, the customer asks for a few extras, each of which seems minor, and together they take five extra hours. If those hours cost you $50 each, that is $250 you did not charge, or about a fifth of the profit gone. Nobody was dishonest. The scope was simply never clear enough to say “that is extra.” That slow growth of a job without the price growing with it is called scope creep.

What to say before you say yes

Whether you use a formal written agreement or a clear quote with terms, cover these points before work begins:

• Scope: exactly what is included, in plain words, and what is not included.
• Timeline: when you start, how long it should take, and what could move the date, including what you need from the customer and by when.
• Price and payment: the total, the deposit, the schedule, and what happens if a payment is late. See Deposits, Payment Terms and Collecting Money Faster.
• Changes: how a change is requested, priced and approved before you do it, which contractors call a change order.
• Communication: who the customer talks to, how quickly you reply, and how updates arrive.
• What happens if something goes wrong: how a problem is raised and how you will respond.

Say it out loud as well as writing it. A written document nobody discusses is only a defense. A conversation followed by a document is an agreement. This is also where the trust and pacing in The Sales Meeting: Trust, Mirroring, Pacing, later in Track 4, earns its keep.

Make it match your brand

A clear expectations page does not have to feel cold. Done well, it is the first proof of your positioning. A company that promises to be organized and then sends a vague one-line quote has already contradicted itself. A company that walks the customer through what will happen, in friendly language, has already delivered on the promise before the first day of work.

Some owners worry that spelling things out will scare customers off. Owners tell us that setting expectations is often where they find out how a customer will be to work with. It tends to scare off the ones who were going to be trouble, and the ones you want are more likely to be reassured. Ask yourself which of those you would rather lose.

This week

Write down the last three times a customer was surprised, whether by the price, the timing or something you did or did not do. For each, write the sentence that would have prevented it, then add those sentences to your quote or agreement template as plain language.

Two to four hours to gather your recurring problems and draft plain-language terms. Drafting costs nothing; having an attorney review your template is a separate cost that varies, and worth getting a quote for.

What did the last unhappy customer assume that you never said? And which favor have you granted so often that it became the rule?