F2F #54: Your deal is lost in another room

Most of the times, you won't get to meet who signs your contracts. Make sure you invite yourself to that conversation.

F2F #54: Your deal is lost in another room

There’s a reason some great calls still end in "give us some more time to make a decision". Because the real decision will happen in another room: one you never entered.

On Monday, I met a serial entrepreneur from the US living in Barcelona, who has been working in sales for 20+ years, who gifted me this wisdom nugget: "most deals are lost in another room". I then spent big part of the day wondering how many times has happened to me and how frustrating it felt.

First-time founders usually find out the hard way that sales are actually Pretty Fucking Hard and that you have to put in real work and effort into every sales process. The only shortcut here is if you've worked in a bigger company previously, where departments, workflows and other chains of command are involved.

In my case, I had worked at two big consultancies before founding MarsBased, so I knew already how most of these things worked. I put in this knowledge to work from day one when I created the company, but still there were many many things unknown to me because although I had had exposure to pre-sales, I had never worked doing sales before.

As you get into sales, as a founder, you learn that the more meetings you make with a person, the closer you get to the deal (usually around 7-8 conversations), but that speaks about the depth factor (how deep must you go with a single person), not about the breadth factor (how many people are involved).

We love selling to the person in front of us. Usually, founders engage in very consultative sales before finding product market fit, to discover needs and users and gauge the common denominator from all their conversations. If there's enough interest in a specific product or functionality, they'll have to gravitate towards that in a company or product pivot. If they're lucky, they hit PMF, and off to the races.

There are many problems in doing sales as a founder, but two of the most common ones are:

  • We don't scale: early in the company's life, there are not enough deals, so you can pour your soul into every conversation and opportunity. Once you hit scale, you have to be more selective, optimise processes, delegate and thus your dedication and perceived effort are diluted.
  • We can't play politics: Selling to bigger companies require bigger teams and lots of patience. Pick your battles: don't sell too early to companies who involve 5-10 people in a deal. Corporations require you to become a diplomat and navigate bureaucracy, workflows, approvals, procurement and other power theater plays.

Therefore, we tend to gravitate towards deals where we feel an affinity for someone and more often than not, we spend too much time with that person without finding out if they're the person who will sign the contract or not. Or maybe I am projecting, here.

The mistake: confusing a friendly contact with a champion

A friendly contact answers your emails and takes your calls. Meets you for coffee and comes over to your office or your event, if you ask nicely.

A champion (sometimes called mobilizers, too) drives change internally and will be your best ally in the other company. If you don’t have one, make one... or accept you’re a coin toss away from losing the deal. 

Now, how do I make a champion?

How to win the other room

In every sales process, I write down the names, roles and LinkedIn profiles of everyone involved to inform my co-founders, so we're on the same page, and to map out who's who, the messages we send and who can be our allies - and who can be the deal-breakers!

In our case, our conversations can be deeply technical. We know that once we have the buy-in from the CTO, the deal is almost done. But getting to the CTO can be tricky, and we won't get past Procurement, Operations or even HR if we don't speak their language and dispel their fears.

Here are four things I do in every multi-person sales process:

  • Ask them why this deal might get killed. They will reveal if there are other vendors being evaluated, or if the deal is too expensive, or if there are compliance constraints, or a strong preference to do it in-house, or if this is a nice-to-have project instead of something critical, or if it's not urgent, etc.
  • Ask them to describe the whole process for me: steps, people involved, timelines, etc. Once I have the full picture, I plan the next steps.
  • Calculate my chances to push this opportunity up or down the priorities list. Deal probabilities get recalculated every second day or after every interaction so I focus on what really moves the needle for us. There are so many things I can get done in a day!
  • Equip them with our best weapons. I have a few documents tailored to a few specific roles: CTOs, CEOs, some for non-technical people, some for their tech people, some for procurement, etc. I need my contact to send these internally for me, because most likely I'll never get the chance to do it.

Once this is done, there's only one thing left to do: ask to meet everyone. Some of the best excuses to ask for this is to save them time, to reduce iterations, to avoid the telephone effect. Also, asking them to speak to every role involved in the process to get their requirements will help to craft the perfect proposal in time, so that's interesting for both parties, and might help you to land those meetings.

If you can’t get the meeting, write an email for every person involved, tailored to them, with the documents they will need and how your solution solves their problem and have your contact forward it to them. This works like a charm. It comes from someone within the company, not from you.

Red flags that scream "another room will kill this"

  • "I’ll share this around and get back to you". No names & No dates? That's corporate ghosting imho.
  • "Let’s loop in Legal later". Later usually means never. If it's important, they'll check the legalese earlier rather than later.
  • "I don't have any questions for you". They were asked to take this call for someone else and they haven't prepared. They're only doing a basic screening.
  • Your contact loves it but doesn't want to involve anyone else right now or prefers to keep it between you and him/her.

As it happens with life, the fun is always happening in the rooms you haven't been invited to. Make sure your voice is heard so they invite you in.