I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on the power of expectation setting.

Let’s say there’s a founder who, by hustling for a month, can raise $500K on Wefunder from their customers and community pretty easily. But if she wants to raise $2 million, that’s going to be really really hard. If I chat with her ahead of time and say “Oh yeah it should be super easy to raise $2 million! No worries!” — when she only raises $500K in the first month, she is going to be very very disappointed in her experience of Wefunder. Net detractor. Bye bye referrals. Bye bye growth.

But if I chat with her ahead of time and say “Well that sounds like a stretch. But maybe shoot for $250K starting out, and then you can always increase that if you are over-subscribed” — when she raises double what I had set her expectation at, she will be over the moon! Delighted customer. NPS of 10. Referral-driven growth!
And the only thing that was different in those two scenarios was that I set different expectations in each one. She raised the same amount of money in each scenario. She put the same effort in. But because of a difference in expectation setting, she shifts from an irate net detractor, to a delighted net promoter.
Shout out to Justin Renfro on Team Wefunder for really embedding this principle of “conservative expectation setting” on our BD team over the last couple of years. I think it’s awesome.

But despite this rather meandering preamble, I am going to completely ignore everything I just wrote, by emphatically declaring that this podcast interview with Rory Billing is the greatest hour of content about “how to be awesome at sales” ever recorded on a microphone, in the history of the universe.

How’s that for conservative expectation setting???
Rory Billing is the Founder and CEO of The Fan’s Place, in Rory’s words “the non-alcoholic beer of sports betting”. And before starting The Fan’s Place, Rory had a number of sales roles, which we dive into.