An excellent point. Personally I am a webmaster and follow the model of promising what I can and trying to beat that.

I can promise advertisers what I feel is reasonable and I find I beat that consistantly.

Thank you for your kind wishes and hope to see you around the blog

I’m simply pointing out that under promising and over delivering leaves money on the table that you could easily bring into your business - due to a loss business opportunity. That doesn’t make it bad or good.

The subtlety between “judging something to be good or bad” and determining whether it is working or not working is very small - but very important.

From the sounds of it, your business model is working for you right now - making you money and meeting your goals.

So, the question is, if you begin to start see that you are consistently able to over deliver, wouldn’t it be worth making an “innovation” to your marketing method (price in your case) to raise the promise - closer to what you are capable of delivering?

Wouldn’t that not only bring more customers back, as well as bring more “new” customers to the table?

Aren’t you already doing just that?

I don’t have the answers to those questions - only you, as a business owner does. And the great part is that there are no right or wrong answers.

Good luck in your business,

JJ

That still does not mean that over delivering is bad for business. As you yourself said people were coming to your client because he over delivered. By over delivering you give yourself a positive reputation and keep current clients coming back for more.

May I please note that on the under promise, I said a reasonable competitive offer, not one that is completely low-balled.

I tell my clients the following about marketing:

- Marketing is creation of the promise that your company is built on.
- Sales is act of delivering the promise to customer once they decide they like your promise.
- Operations is delivering on the promise.

And make no mistakes about it, Marketing is about what the customer wants - not what you think they want or are currently offering.

When you talk about under promising and then over delivering, you are in fact under-marketing.

This is all a little esoteric, so let me give an example of what I mean.

I have a client that will give a customer’s money back if they are not completely satisfied with the service he provides (no, not an IT service). And he has done this for 37 years. But the only people that know this are the clients that have been dissatisfied - he’s never made it part of his promise. He’s never made it part of his marketing. So no new customers are choosing him because of the fact that he regularly over delivers - because they don’t know. He hasn’t told them.

So this “over-delivery” is costing him money. In his case it’s a refund of cash, every time the customer is dissatisfied. In your case, it’s also money - specifically all the bids have you NOT gotten because you were unwilling to promise what you could actually deliver on?

He has literally been under promising and over delivering.

But now, that guarantee (a 100% money back guarantee) has become part of his promise - part of his marketing and it is drawing in customers, by the dozens. Sure, it costs him occasionally, as there is the rare customer that will take advantage of him - but the number of new customers that are coming to him that are doing so just because he is willing to make a promise that no other business owner is willing to make is phenomenal.

I’m not saying to over promise. That is even worse, but by under promising, you are under marketing. And by under marketing you are costing yourselves a lot of business that you’ve earned because of the systems that you have in place.

The bottom line is when you talk about marketing be sure that you understand what marketing is.

It revolves around the question, “What is it about our business that is going to make our likely customers choose us over every other option they have to fulfill their needs?”

If you don’t offer it - someone else will and you will soon be out of business.

@Jon - Ha ha, don’t worry next post you wont…. MAYBE

@ BaldChemist - True, but giving them all that ahead of a time estimate your gave (most will want a quote), leaves you with more respectability and “credit” in their eyes. Besides that I agree with everything you said.

@Simon
I think you hit the nail on the head. Excellent example. Really leaves me nothing to add.

Man, I have the shortest comment

Prime example - I have a paying customer who asked whether something could be tweaked to best suit his own needs. I said I’d put something together within the next 3 or 4 days; not to lie to him, but because I know that it *could* take that long, depending on other factors.

But my aim will always be to beat the date I initially set, to challenge myself to set a marker, and beat it. That’s not deceptive practice, it’s working hard to over-deliver.

Maybe the title of the post is a bit mis-leading. The focus should be on “over-deliver”, not on “under-promise” (positive vs negative re-enforcement).

Now, I agree with what you say about a business not always needing what it asks for. The media creates wants in consumers and peoples businesses are based of wants. In essence we could argue that 90% of things anyone asks for are wants and not needs. (Just playing devils advocate)

In terms of development, I think of web development has to budget in time for different shortfalls. So far I’ve been very lucky with my ventures and haven’t hit any MAJOR snags, but I can say that from a clients point of view I get very frustrated if dates get moved back. It makes me not want to give the programmer or developer repeat business (now this can be changed by an end product that warrants the extra time of course.)

By giving a client things that they don’t need you create an over saturation of useless stuff. All this does is ultimately slows down the clients progress on the important stuff and creates dissatisfaction as they don’t get the important stuff perfect because they are tweaking and playing around with any other stuff you gave them. There is a very careful balance most businesses have to maintain with that concept.

@ Mr. Javo - Of course, that is the point of the post exactly. Setting reasonable deadlines is acceptable, working hard to beat them is what sets you apart from everyone else.