What Is Sandbagging in Sales? Definition and the Pros and Cons

If you’ve been considering a career in sales, it’s important to understand all of the strategies and techniques that effective salespeople use to be successful. Contrary to popular belief, good salespeople do more than just convey a product’s features and benefits to customers. A successful career in sales also requires you to learn how to manage your employer’s expectations about your abilities and your sales results. Some salespeople try to achieve these objectives by using a strategy called sandbagging.

In this post, we’ll explore the idea of sandbagging in sales and examine the potential pros and cons of this strategy. We’ll also offer some tips to help you to effectively achieve the same goals without resorting to sandbagging tactics.

What is sandbagging in sales?

It’s important to have a proper understanding of the definition of sandbagging if you want to consider it as a sales strategy. In sales, sandbagging is a way of lowering expectations to ensure that you exceed them. This can be accomplished in various ways:

Sometimes, deals can be intentionally delayed, ensuring that they close during a specific timeframe - like in the middle of an important quota period
Salespeople can also withhold information about a deal’s progress, or downplay the state of the negotiations, to limit management’s disappointment if the sale fails to materialize
There are even times when a salesperson can downplay the significance or size of the sale until it is closed

Obviously, this strategy can be more than a little bit deceptive. And indeed, some salespeople are very good at manipulating their reported results in ways that ensure that they always meet or exceed their established quotas.

But it’s also important to recognize that there are valid reasons why some people may need to downplay expectations to fit their personality and work style. As with any popular sales strategy, there are pros and cons associated with the use of the sandbagging technique. You will need to review these potential benefits and pitfalls to determine whether sales sandbagging is the right strategy for you, or whether there are other techniques that you can use to manage expectations.

What does sandbagging mean in business?

It is also important to note that sandbagging strategies are even used on a more macro scale, by entire companies. For example, many companies downplay revenue and profit expectations so that they can eventually exceed those expectations when they report earnings. That strategy is sometimes used to great effect by companies that want to ensure that shareholders remain satisfied with the company’s results. The management team will predict results that are substantially lower than what they believe they can achieve.

In practice, this basic technique is relatively common, even if it’s not always obvious. In many industries, the practice of choosing the lowest of reasonable expectations is viewed as a conservative approach. It adheres to the time-honored strategy of under-promising and over-delivering. However, there are times when more noticeable sandbagging can occur with regularity - causing investors and analysts to lose faith in the company’s ability or willingness to predict accurate earnings.

As you might expect, the more egregious and obvious forms of sandbagging can open a company up to potential scrutiny from government regulators. For example, the SEC’s securities laws specifically address fraud and deception and the agency has brought actions against companies and people who have used sandbagging techniques in ways that violate those laws.

Sandbagging in sales: the pros

Reducing external pressure

Most experienced salespeople have experienced the type of pressure that can occur when management knows that a big sale or deal is being negotiated. That immense pressure can place undue stress on you during critical negotiations. After all, if everyone is expecting your huge sale to close, the last thing you want to do is disappoint them. By downplaying the real potential of a big sale or withholding information about the current state of the negotiations, you can reduce that external pressure and focus on making the best possible deal.

Building confidence

When you’re a new employee in any sales role, there can often be a palpable fear of failure. That’s especially true if your experience hasn’t prepared you to set reasonably accurate expectations for your sales goals. By deliberately setting the most conservative goals and focusing on meeting those bare minimums, you can gradually build the confidence you need to succeed.

Exceeding expectations to impress management

One of the easiest ways to impress your managers is to always reach and exceed their expectations. If you can effectively manage those expectations using strategies like sandbagging, it can be much easier to exceed your quotas and earn bonuses and recognition. Often, this can lead to promotions, increased compensation, and expanded responsibilities.

Meeting commission goals on a regular basis

If you work for a company that uses commission-based compensation structures, those commissions may be tied to set quotas. By controlling your sales process and maintaining conservative expectations, you may be able to better manage your results to ensure that you exceed those quotas. This can result in increased commissions in many instances, which translates to more money for you.

Sandbagging in sales: the cons

Delaying a sale’s closing risks losing the deal

If there’s one hard rule in sales, it’s that every good salesperson knows to strike when the iron is hot. To do that, they need to move to close the sale at the first sign that the buyer is prepared to make the deal. That can make sandbagging difficult, since any attempt to manage the closing timeframe always runs the risk of losing the customer’s interest. As a rule, whenever you’re confronted with a buyer who is obviously intent on making a purchase, you should forgo sandbagging and secure that sale.

Negative impact on team goals

Sales sandbagging can be particularly troublesome when you’re part of a sales team or group. It’s always important to consider how your sandbagging might impact the team’s ability to reach its goals. If your current sales quota period involves a team effort, you might want to avoid sandbagging to ensure that the group achieves its objective.

Barriers to communication

One of the biggest disadvantages to sandbagging can occur when you’re dealing with customers who are tough to reach. You might delay closing a sale only to discover that your lines of communication with that decision-maker have broken down. Obviously, this strategy should only be employed if you can reasonably rely on those open lines of communication.

It can destroy trust

Finally, it’s important to recognize that overuse of this technique can lead to a breakdown in trust. Eventually, management, clients, or co-workers may begin to suspect that you’re downplaying expectations to make yourself look good. If that happens, their trust may be difficult to regain. To avoid that loss of trust, you should be very careful about how you use sandbagging techniques.

Why you shouldn’t use sandbagging in your sales career

Since sandbagging involves intentional deception, it is not something that employers appreciate. Fortunately, there are ways to manage expectations without relying on techniques like sandbagging. For example:

Understand the difference between conservative estimates and outright deception

Sandbagging is considered to be a form of deception, since it requires you to either withhold relevant information about sales or intentionally delay closings. While that can be one way to manage everyone’s expectations, it can also have a negative impact on your reputation if people figure out what you’re doing.

To avoid that, learn the difference between sandbagging and maintaining a conservative outlook in your sales forecasts. Downplaying a deal that you believe is likely to close is different than hiding one that you know is going to close in two days. The former option shows that you’re conservative about your expectations. The latter is just a lie.

Learn your craft and how to read clients’ buying signals

Before you can make conservative forecasts, you need to know how to sell and read clients. Experience and sales success will hone your instincts and help you to recognize the cues that buyers provide when they are really interested in a deal. Over time, you will get a better handle on which leads are hot, which are cold, and just how long it might take to close each kind.

Recognize when you can and can’t use this conservative approach

Once you learn to identify the important factors involved in any deal - the monetary amount, closing probability, and close date proximity - you’ll be better positioned to know when a conservative forecast makes sense. A deal that could involve anything from $1,000 to $10,000 can be forecast at that lower number and still be an honest assessment. After all, every deal is subject to change until it’s secure.

Remember, the goal is to be conservative whenever possible. That enables you to set lower expectations, avoid management disappointment, and still look good if the results exceed your forecast. Just remember that there’s a time and place for taking that conservative approach. Like everything else in life, moderation is a good thing.

Summary

Sales can be a tough job and it’s not always easy to manage expectations and find the consistent success you might hope to achieve. By successfully incorporating conservative forecasting strategies into your sales efforts, you can more effectively balance expectations and results in your sales career - without resorting to deceptive practices like sandbagging.

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