Guardrails instead of rules

There is a moment in which I decide whether a sales organisation works. It is unspectacular and usually happens on the phone.

A salesperson is with a customer, the situation shifts, and they would now have to decide something. A discount. A contract term. Whether a consultant from the vendor joins or somebody from the company itself. And then they say: I have to clear that internally, I will come back to you.

Sometimes that is right. Usually it is the beginning of losing.

Why that is expensive

Not because of the discount. Because of the signal.

The customer sits in a room with six to ten people, most of whom have never seen you. He needs somebody who helps him get this through internally. And at exactly that moment he notices that his contact is not the one who decides.

From then on he is no longer talking to you. He is talking through you to somebody he does not know.

Anyone who first has to escalate three levels up arrives too late. Not because the wrong people sit at the top, but because in the meantime the conversation has cooled and the competitor has answered.

What the research says

While working on my master’s thesis I came across a term that describes exactly this. Gartner calls it tactical flexibility and lists it as one of the traits distinguishing high-performing salespeople from average ones.

The core of it is unspectacular: average salespeople orient themselves strongly around rules and process requirements. High performers read situational signals and pick the fitting approach from a repertoire of options.

That sounds like a statement about people. I consider it a statement about organisations.

Because nobody reads signals if they are not allowed to act anyway. Whoever has no room to decide learns very quickly not to look in the first place. That is not a character flaw, it is an entirely sensible adaptation to the environment.

The difference that matters

I notice that a misunderstanding often arises here. Room to decide gets confused with arbitrariness.

It is not. It needs a frame, and the frame has to exist beforehand, not afterwards.

For me that means concretely: the key account manager is the project lead for their customer. They decide who they bring in, from their own company or from the vendor side. They have a defined scope on price and contract terms. And they are trained on that scope before they need it.

That is the point I consider most important. Freedom without training is not freedom, it is a trap. Giving somebody room on pricing without first teaching them what a discount does to the margin and when it pays off punishes them afterwards for a decision they were never able to make.

Guardrails means: I tell you where the edges are and you decide in between. Rules means: I tell you what to do.

The difference is not semantic. It is the difference between a salesperson who thinks and one who works through a list.

What that means for the manager

Uncomfortably, it means having to live with decisions you would have taken differently yourself.

I had to learn that. When somebody decides something within the guardrails that I consider suboptimal, then it is their decision. I can discuss it afterwards. I can ask what led them there, and I usually learn more from that than they do. What I cannot do, without tearing down the guardrails immediately, is take it back.

A no without an alternative is not leadership, it is administration. And on the finish line salespeople do not need control, they need creative support. Whoever is meant to give it has to be allowed to decide.

Where the line runs

There are decisions a manager takes alone, and I stand by that. Strategic direction, personnel matters, anything with legal weight. Involvement makes sense there, delegation does not.

The art is to keep that list short and to say it out loud. An unspoken boundary becomes a trap. A spoken one is simply a boundary.

What I took away from this

When a salesperson has to say in a customer meeting that they need to clear it internally, that is rarely their problem. It is mine.

And when I notice that a lot gets escalated in an organisation, I no longer look at the people first. I look at the guardrails. Usually there are none, only rules, and rules cannot be stretched, they can only be broken or followed.

How much can be decided at the customer in your organisation, without asking first?