Chris Arsenault

Category: The Musings

Long-form writing on technology, leadership, AI strategy, and execution inside complex organizations.

  • The 2023-24 Efficiency Era

    Looking back: April 2026

    The period roughly from mid-2022 through most of 2024 was the efficiency era in B2B. Growth-at-all-costs became profitable-growth. Rule-of-40 became the standard benchmark. Revenue organizations had to re-optimize for capital efficiency in ways most of them hadn’t had to before. What came out of that period reshaped how revenue is thought about in 2026, and some of the lessons are worth preserving even now that growth has returned as a priority.

    What Changed

    The efficiency era forced three specific changes that persisted:

    1. The ROI conversation moved earlier in the sale.
    Pre-2022, many enterprise deals closed on “strategic value” without a rigorous ROI case. Buyers had budget. They could commit to strategic initiatives on partial information. The CFO was a rubber stamp in many organizations.

    In the efficiency era, that flipped. The CFO (or the CFO’s office) became a primary stakeholder in most enterprise purchases. Deals without a clear ROI argument stalled. Deals with rigorous ROI cases closed at materially higher rates. Sellers who could help their champions build the financial case became dramatically more valuable than sellers who relied on strategic-value arguments.

    That shift stuck. Even now, in an environment where growth is more rewarded, buyers have retained the muscle of requiring ROI-based justification. Sellers who don’t build financial cases are at a permanent disadvantage.

    2. Customer expansion became more important than new logo.
    In the efficiency era, expansion revenue was cheaper to acquire than new-logo revenue. Companies optimized accordingly — shifting resources from new business to customer success, account management, and expansion motions.

    Many of those shifts proved permanent. Customer success transformed from a reactive support function into a proactive revenue function. Account executives started being measured on expansion as well as new business. The economics of the customer base became more visible to executives.

    3. Pipeline quality replaced pipeline quantity as the primary discipline.
    Pre-efficiency era, pipeline coverage ratios of 3x, 4x, 5x were common — and most of that pipeline was low-probability. Efficiency era showed that carrying inflated pipeline was expensive: every deal required seller time, SE time, deal desk time, legal time. The cost of pursuing 5x coverage with a 15% win rate was often worse than 2x coverage with a 35% win rate.

    The shift to pipeline-quality discipline stuck. Qualifying out became a legitimate activity. Sellers who walked away from bad-fit deals looked better, not worse. Forecast accuracy rose. The average deal in pipeline got richer even as the quantity dropped.

    What Didn’t Stick

    Some efficiency-era patterns reverted once the macro environment loosened:

    • The most aggressive cost-cutting of GTM teams proved to be over-correction. Companies that cut too deep ended up rebuilding in 2024-2025, often at higher cost.
    • Marketing budget compression went too far at many companies. The ones that preserved some demand generation during the efficiency era had easier growth acceleration later than the ones that eliminated it entirely.
    • Some companies over-rotated to product-led growth, which worked for specific categories but not for the enterprise-heavy businesses they were applied to.

    The Pattern Underneath

    What the efficiency era really surfaced — once the macro noise was filtered out — was which revenue motions were durable and which were dependent on cheap capital. Companies that had been masking motion inefficiency with abundant marketing spend or aggressive hiring had nowhere to hide. Companies with genuinely efficient motions came through the period strengthened.

    That sort has held up. In 2026, the revenue organizations that emerged from the efficiency era with strong discipline are outperforming the ones that tried to keep the old model alive.

    What I Watch Now

    Coming out of that era, there are a handful of metrics I watch that I didn’t pay as much attention to before:

    • CAC payback by segment. Not blended CAC/LTV. Specifically, how long does it take to pay back the acquisition cost on the segment of customers you actually want. If the answer is more than 18 months, the segment may not be viable at current economics.
    • Net revenue retention from year two. Year-one NRR is noisy because it includes implementation dynamics. Year-two NRR tells you whether the customer base is actually expanding or slowly churning with a veneer of expansion.
    • Win rate trend by segment. If win rate is dropping in your best segment, something is changing — either competition, positioning, or buyer behavior.

    These are operational metrics, not strategy metrics. They tell you whether the revenue engine is healthy under the surface.

    What I’d Tell Someone Rebuilding Post-Efficiency

    If you’re rebuilding a revenue organization in 2026, the efficiency-era lessons are still the right foundation:

    • ROI-first discovery and qualification
    • Expansion motions as a primary, not secondary, revenue source
    • Pipeline quality over pipeline quantity
    • Segment-specific economics rather than blended averages
    • Operational metrics reviewed weekly, not just quarterly

    Once those are in place, the growth-era motions — demand generation, geographic expansion, new-logo acquisition, enterprise land-and-expand — layer on top of a durable foundation.

    The 2023-24 efficiency era was painful for many revenue leaders. It was also one of the most clarifying periods in my career for thinking about what actually makes a revenue organization durable. The companies that emerged with discipline are still benefiting from it. The ones that didn’t are still catching up.

  • Post-Pandemic Buyer Behavior

    Looking back: April 2026

    The buyer I sold to in 2019 doesn’t exist anymore. Some of what changed was temporary; some was permanent; some was always there and just became more visible. Sorting the three has been clarifying — and has changed how I approach every sales motion since.

    Here’s what I think actually changed, and what it means for how to sell in 2026.

    Buyers Are Better Informed Before You Meet Them

    Pre-2020, a significant portion of the buyer’s education happened during the sales cycle. You ran demos, walked them through case studies, explained the product, answered their questions.

    Now, by the time a buyer is willing to take a first meeting, they’ve already read your website, watched a demo video, scanned your LinkedIn, read about your company, and often talked to one or two peers who use your product. The seller’s role has shifted from educator to validator — you’re not teaching them what the product does; you’re helping them confirm (or challenge) what they already think.

    This changed the craft of discovery. The old “walk me through what you do” opening is now a waste of time. The buyer already knows. The better opening is “what do you already understand about us, and what are the gaps I can fill in?” That question respects the buyer’s preparation and surfaces what they actually need from you.

    Meetings Are Shorter

    The 60-minute pre-2020 meeting has given way to the 30-minute meeting as default. Buyers schedule tighter calendars. They tolerate less pre-amble. They expect you to get to the point faster.

    This tightening reshapes meeting design. You can’t run a 30-minute meeting the way you ran a 60-minute one with a compression factor. You have to restructure — less discovery theater, more specific value delivery, tighter next-step definition.

    The sellers who adapted to this kept their effectiveness. The ones who tried to squeeze the old 60-minute structure into 30 minutes just delivered worse meetings in less time.

    Buying Committees Are More Skeptical

    Something shifted in the 2020-2022 period that left buyers permanently more cautious. Deals that would have closed on a verbal commitment in 2019 now go through three rounds of internal review. Deals that would have moved on the economic buyer’s say-so now need to satisfy a procurement team, a legal team, and often an executive committee.

    Part of this is post-crisis tightening of governance. Part of it is genuinely higher buyer sophistication. Part of it is skepticism about vendor claims that built up during a period when vendor promises outran delivery capacity.

    Whatever the cause, the practical effect is that closing an enterprise deal now requires more internal advocacy, more evidence, and more patience than it did pre-2020. Sellers who forecast on old timelines miss their numbers. Sellers who adapted to the new reality of longer internal processes forecast more accurately.

    The Tolerance for Vendor-First Messaging Collapsed

    Pre-2020, buyers would sit through vendor-first messaging — product decks, feature comparisons, company origin stories — before getting to what they actually needed. They’d give you the courtesy of the full presentation before engaging.

    They don’t anymore. If the first five minutes of your meeting are about you and your product, the buyer is either disengaged or moving toward ending the meeting. What works now is buyer-first messaging — “here’s what we think is happening for organizations like yours,” followed by specific relevance, followed by your company only when the buyer asks for it.

    References and Social Proof Became Dominant

    Pre-2020, references mattered but weren’t always decisive. Now they often are. Buyers who can’t talk to two or three current customers before deciding usually won’t decide.

    This has raised the importance of customer success and reference programs dramatically. Companies with strong reference programs close deals that companies with weak programs lose. The delta is often larger than any product feature difference.

    Buyers Are Faster to Disqualify

    Pre-2020, a buyer who was lukewarm on your offering would often continue the conversation anyway — giving you a few more meetings to change their mind. Now, a lukewarm buyer disqualifies early. If the first meeting doesn’t create clear excitement, there often isn’t a second meeting.

    The Principle I Apply Now

    Every aspect of the sales motion has become more unforgiving. The messaging has to be more buyer-first. The meetings have to be more specific. The process has to account for longer internal cycles. The references have to be stronger. The margin for error on any specific interaction is smaller.

    This sounds harder — and it is, for sellers running old-school motions. For sellers who already ran high-craft motions, it’s actually easier now than it was pre-2020, because the buyers reward high-craft work more distinctly than they did before.

    The meta-lesson: the post-pandemic buyer amplified the differential between thoughtful selling and transactional selling. Thoughtful wins. Transactional loses. The middle ground compressed.

    If you’re selling to a 2026 buyer the way you sold to a 2019 buyer, you’re almost certainly missing. If you’ve adapted to the new buyer, you’ve probably found a market that rewards serious craft more than it used to. Both realities are downstream of the same underlying shift.

  • The Remote-Selling Shift

    Looking back: April 2026

    When enterprise selling moved remote in 2020, a lot of what had worked in the pre-2020 era had to be rebuilt. Some of the rebuilding produced better motions than existed before. Some of it produced worse ones. Understanding which is which has been clarifying in retrospect.

    What Got Harder

    Reading the room.
    In-person meetings transmitted dozens of small signals — how the champion was reacting to the skeptic, who was checking their phone, whether the energy in the room was with you or against you. On video, most of those signals disappeared. Sellers who relied heavily on reading the room had to rebuild their craft around the narrower bandwidth of video meetings.

    The best sellers found ways to compensate — asking more direct questions, checking in explicitly with specific stakeholders, structuring the meeting to draw out reactions that would have been spontaneous in person. The lesser sellers kept expecting the signals to come through and missed them.

    The hallway conversation.
    In-person meetings had a structure where the formal meeting was 70% of the value and the 30% that happened in hallways, over coffee, walking to the parking lot was often where the real progress happened. Those informal moments disappeared almost entirely in remote selling.

    The adaptation was to engineer equivalents: specific one-on-one video calls, separate calendar time for off-record conversations, use of messaging platforms for between-meeting dialogue. These worked, partially. The equivalents never fully matched the spontaneous-hallway version.

    Building trust with people you haven’t met in person.
    Some of this wasn’t obvious until later. Trust can be built on video — but the depth and durability of that trust, in retrospect, seems shallower than the in-person equivalent. Relationships formed entirely remote during 2020-2022 often proved less resilient to difficulty than relationships with equivalent touch count that included some in-person contact.

    The lesson: the high-bandwidth modalities build relationships faster than the low-bandwidth ones. When everything was low-bandwidth, the relationships still formed, but with shallower foundations.

    What Got Easier

    Access.
    Getting a meeting with a senior executive became dramatically easier in 2020. The logistics overhead of in-person meetings — flights, parking, calendar blocks — had constrained how many meetings senior people could take. When all meetings became 30-minute video calls, senior executives could take 6 to 10 meetings a day where they previously took 3 to 5.

    This meaningfully expanded the pool of possible conversations for many sellers. Cold outreach to executives became more productive because the calendar constraint had eased. Existing relationships became easier to maintain because a quick video check-in was lower-friction than scheduling a lunch.

    Geographic reach.
    Regional sellers who could previously only cover their geography could now work across regions. Enterprise deals in cities the rep had never visited became viable. This expanded the effective market for many sellers and compressed the advantage of locally-based competitors.

    Parallel engagement across buying committees.
    In-person selling was almost always sequential — you had meetings with specific stakeholders in specific sequence, and the timeline was governed by travel logistics. Remote selling let sellers run parallel engagement across multiple stakeholders simultaneously. The CTO call could happen Tuesday, the CFO call Wednesday, the operations call Thursday — with all three feeding into a unified internal pipeline of the deal.

    This actually compressed some deal cycles, especially for deals where multi-threading was the primary constraint.

    What Became a Permanent Mixed Bag

    Discovery.
    Discovery calls got more efficient (no travel time, tighter agendas) and less rich (fewer side conversations, less whiteboard collaboration). The net effect varied by industry and deal type. Complex, multi-stakeholder discovery still benefited from in-person intensity. Simpler, single-stakeholder discovery was often better on video.

    Closing.
    Closing a significant deal via video remained awkward for years. Something about the final steps — the handshake equivalent, the moment of commitment — didn’t transmit cleanly over the video medium. Many sellers found that they could do 80% of a deal remotely but wanted the final stages in person.

    What I’d Tell Anyone Rebuilding

    If you’re optimizing a sales motion in 2026, the remote-selling lessons are still live:

    • Don’t fight the hybrid equilibrium. Engineer it.
    • High-bandwidth modalities (in-person, long-form video, workshops) build deeper relationships faster. Use them strategically.
    • Low-bandwidth modalities (email, chat, short video) scale broader but shallower. Use them for volume.
    • Sequence deliberately. Use remote for early, in-person for inflection points, remote for execution.

    The sellers doing the best work now are the ones who’ve internalized this layering. Not remote-first. Not in-person-first. Deliberate-sequencing.

    The remote shift didn’t kill in-person selling and it didn’t replace it. It reshaped the hierarchy of which modalities do which work. Five years in, the sellers who’ve digested that reshaping have better motions than existed before. The ones who haven’t are still nostalgic for 2019 or still overcommitted to 2020.

    Neither nostalgia nor overcommitment serves. The hybrid reality is the stable one now. Work from there.

  • What Changed in 2020

    Looking back: April 2026

    Six years out, the changes that began in 2020 look different than they did in the moment. Some things I thought were temporary adaptations turned out to be permanent. Some things I thought would persist reverted. The clearest lesson, in retrospect, is that crisis-induced change separates durable shifts from temporary ones faster than any other force I’ve observed in my career.

    Here’s how I now sort what actually changed.

    The Changes That Reverted

    Some of the changes in 2020 were adaptations to specific crisis conditions. They reverted once the conditions did — though often to a different equilibrium than existed before.

    Many sellers expected enterprise buyers to permanently prefer digital-only engagement.
    That didn’t happen. Within 18 to 24 months, enterprise buyers had re-sorted their preferences. Digital-only for early-stage conversations and routine check-ins. In-person for strategic conversations, executive-level relationships, and complex deals. The equilibrium that emerged was hybrid, not digital.

    The sellers who over-committed to all-digital motions in 2020-2021 had to re-invest in in-person capability. The ones who kept some in-person discipline through the remote era came out of the transition faster.

    Office-first buying committees didn’t return as fully as some expected, but they didn’t go fully distributed either.
    The committee dynamics were reshaped. Some companies became distributed-first. Many became hybrid. Very few remained office-first in the way they were before 2020. The sellers who learned to navigate hybrid buying committees — where some stakeholders are remote and some are co-located — were better positioned than those who assumed one or the other.

    The Changes That Stuck

    Buyers got comfortable with longer evaluation cycles and more independent research.
    One of the durable 2020 shifts was that buyers expected to do more of their own research before engaging with sellers. The “pre-sales” phase of the buying journey elongated, and the point at which sellers entered the conversation shifted later.

    This changed the marketing-sales math. Content became more important because it shaped the buyer’s thinking before any seller was involved. Seller-facing pipeline activity became about capturing already-informed buyers rather than educating uninformed ones.

    The tolerance for generic outreach collapsed.
    Before 2020, generic cadences still had some yield. In the 2020-2022 period, buyer inboxes became overwhelmed with outreach, and the response rate on generic templates dropped to near-zero. That response rate never really recovered.

    The operators who understood this early and shifted to specificity-first outbound took share from operators who kept running volume-first motions. The latter group is still diminishing now.

    Procurement and legal review timelines lengthened.
    This was partly a 2020 adaptation (remote procurement was slower) and partly a broader trend toward tighter enterprise governance. Either way, the closing process in most enterprise deals is noticeably longer than it was pre-2020, and it hasn’t reverted.

    Sellers who update their sales cycle assumptions to reflect this reality forecast more accurately. Sellers who assume pre-2020 timelines slip more often.

    Hybrid buying committees added a layer of complexity.
    The buying committee in 2020 started including people who might never meet the seller in person. Technical evaluators participating remotely. Executive sponsors dropping into video calls for 15 minutes. Procurement running all negotiations asynchronously. This complexity stuck.

    The Changes I Didn’t Expect

    Social capital became more portable.
    In 2020, a lot of professional networking moved online. LinkedIn took on increased importance. Professional communities on Slack, Discord, and other platforms emerged. What I didn’t expect was that these channels would remain important even after in-person networking returned.

    The result is that social capital has become more portable than it used to be. Someone’s reputation in an online community can now materially affect their career in a way that didn’t happen pre-2020.

    Founder-level thought leadership became higher-leverage.
    Partly because of the shift to online engagement, founder-level voices became more important as demand generation. Founders who consistently posted, wrote, or spoke in public built audiences that drove pipeline at lower cost than traditional demand generation channels.

    The gap between high-effort and low-effort sellers widened.
    Before 2020, the delta between the top-quartile seller and the average seller was real but not extreme. After 2020, the buyer expectations shifted in ways that amplified the gap. Top-quartile sellers — the ones doing deep pre-meeting research, specific outbound, patient relationship-building, and structured close plans — did dramatically better relative to their average peers.

    The Meta-Lesson

    What 2020 really changed, more than any specific tactic, was the tolerance for mediocrity. Buyers got smarter, more distracted, and more selective. Sellers who responded with higher-quality, more specific, more relationship-invested work did better. Sellers who kept running the old volume-first, specificity-thin motions did worse.

    The playbook didn’t flip. It just gave disproportionate rewards to operators who were already running the high-effort version.

    Six years out, the thing I’d tell anyone who went through that period is this: sort your 2020 changes honestly. Some were temporary. Some were permanent. Some were the best thing that ever happened to your career. Some were accidents of crisis that you’ve been carrying forward without noticing.

    The clarity comes from the sorting, not from the changes themselves.

  • BD Pattern Recognition From the Pre-2020 Era

    Looking back: April 2026

    The patterns that defined B2B BD in the pre-2020 era don’t all apply anymore. Some do. Some have been reshaped. Some have disappeared entirely. Sorting which is which has been one of the most useful retrospective exercises I’ve done — because the patterns that are still durable are the ones worth continuing to invest in, and the ones that have decayed are worth actively unlearning.

    What Worked Then and Still Works

    In-person relationship building still works.
    Despite everything that changed around 2020, the underlying mechanics of trust-based selling are unchanged. People still buy from people they trust. Trust is still built through consistent, low-extraction behavior over time. The physical modality of how that happens changed, but the underlying dynamic didn’t.

    Referrals still convert at multiples of cold outbound.
    This hasn’t shifted. If anything, the value of a warm referral has increased as the noise around outbound has grown. The difference is that the mechanics of making referrals happen have shifted — people are harder to reach, introductions require more context, and the expectation of specificity has increased.

    Senior relationships still open doors that junior outreach can’t.
    The CEO-to-CEO introduction, the peer-level conversation, the executive sponsor on a strategic deal — these moves still matter. What’s changed is the ratio of deals where they’re available versus where they’re required. In the pre-2020 era, you could occasionally skip this work. In the current era, senior relationships are the unlock for more deals, not fewer.

    What Worked Then and Works Less Well Now

    The conference circuit as a sourcing strategy.
    In the pre-2020 era, a well-run conference season could produce most of an annual pipeline for many enterprise sellers. The industry events were attended by the right people, the relationships formed there were durable, and the pipeline conversion from conference meetings was reliable.

    This still works — but at lower volume. Conferences have become more fragmented, attendance patterns have shifted, and the conversion rate from conference meetings to pipeline has dropped. The sellers who still run the conference playbook well can produce pipeline from it. The sellers who relied on it as their dominant channel have had to rebuild their sourcing strategy.

    Long-form cold outbound with generic cadences.
    Five-email sequences with light personalization used to work. They don’t anymore. The market has been trained by a decade of template outbound, and the response rate on generic cadences has collapsed — even when those cadences are well-designed by pre-2020 standards.

    Quarterly business reviews as the primary account management tool.
    QBRs used to be the backbone of enterprise account management. They still exist, but they’ve lost relative importance. Customers have become less patient with structured review meetings that don’t produce value. The account management work that matters is now spread across more frequent, lighter-weight touchpoints.

    What Worked Then and Doesn’t Work Now

    Relationship-based selling as a substitute for specific value.
    In the pre-2020 era, you could occasionally close deals where the relationship was so strong that the specific value delivered was secondary. The buyer trusted the seller and the seller’s company enough to proceed on faith that the implementation would be worth it.

    This doesn’t work as reliably anymore. Buyers have become more scrutiny-oriented. Boards require more proof. Economic pressure has made “I trust you, let’s do it” less available as a closing move. Relationships still matter enormously — but they’re now a precondition for being in the consideration set, not a substitute for demonstrating specific value.

    The handshake-and-a-sketch procurement process.
    Pre-2020, in certain industries, you could close seven-figure deals with a relatively light paper trail. Procurement was often deferential to the executive sponsor. Legal moved quickly when the economic buyer had decided. This has almost entirely reversed.

    The Retrospective Lesson

    Looking back, the mistake I’ve watched most often is operators who stopped doing the old things because the new things felt more current. The in-person investment, the senior relationship cultivation, the referral hygiene, the patient long-term depositing — these were valuable pre-2020 and they’re valuable now. Some got dismissed during the digital shift as old-school thinking, and the operators who let them atrophy paid for it.

    The converse mistake — operators who refused to adapt to new dynamics — paid equally.

    The ones who are winning now are the ones who layered new on top of old. Durable fundamentals, updated execution, honest assessment of what changed and what didn’t.

    The fundamentals of trust-based revenue haven’t changed. The execution has. Both matter.

  • The CIO Rotation That Killed My Best Deal

    Looking back: April 2026

    I’ve told versions of this story to a lot of people I’ve mentored. It’s one of the cleanest lessons I’ve ever learned in enterprise selling, and it cost enough that I remember the details more than a decade later.

    The Setup

    The deal was with a large telecommunications carrier. The champion was the CIO — not just my champion, my lead champion. The kind of executive sponsor every enterprise seller hopes for. She understood the technology, had authority over the decision, and had personally advocated for our solution against internal skepticism.

    We were nine months into a 12-month cycle. The deal was worth low seven figures. Legal was engaged. Procurement had the redlines. I’d forecasted the close for the following quarter, and the number was good enough that it was going to earn my team president’s club.

    Then the CIO got promoted.

    Not to a better role at the same carrier — to a different business unit. A different market segment, a different portfolio, a different buying authority. She wasn’t leaving the company. She was moving to a role that had no visibility into, or authority over, the deal she’d been championing.

    What Happened Next

    Her replacement walked in on a Monday. The handover was less than a week. Her new boss introduced her to the vendors she was inheriting as part of the buying portfolio — including us.

    She was professional. She took the meeting. She asked good questions. And then she made clear that she wanted to take the next 60 days to evaluate all the open vendor relationships and make her own assessment before moving forward on any of them.

    Sixty days became ninety. Ninety became one hundred and twenty. By the time she was ready to move, the internal budget timing had shifted, the original business case had to be rebuilt with her name on it, and the organizational momentum we’d built over nine months was effectively reset to zero.

    The deal didn’t die. It closed — nine months later, at 60% of the original scope, because by the time the new CIO was comfortable, the business conditions had shifted.

    What I Got Wrong

    I had multi-threaded the deal somewhat. I’d built relationships with the CIO’s direct reports, with procurement, with the architecture team. What I had not done — and this is the specific failure that cost me a year — is build a relationship with the CIO’s peer executives or her boss.

    My champion was strong. But she was single-threaded on her own authority. When she moved, her authority moved with her, and nobody above her had a personal investment in the deal.

    If I’d invested in one relationship at her boss’s level — a casual but consistent relationship over the nine-month cycle — the transition would have played out differently. The boss would have vouched for the deal to the new CIO. The new CIO would have inherited a semi-endorsed relationship instead of a blank-slate evaluation.

    I didn’t build that relationship because I didn’t see the need. The deal was moving. The CIO was on board. Why burn political capital to get time with her boss when everything was going well?

    The reason why is exactly the scenario that played out. Deals don’t die when they’re going well. They die when the conditions change. And the conditions always change.

    The Principle I Now Apply

    In every enterprise deal I’m in now — or that I coach someone through — I try to make sure there’s one relationship above the level of the primary champion. Not deep. Not intrusive. Just enough of a personal connection that if the champion moves, promotes, or leaves, there’s someone else in the organization who remembers the deal, thinks favorably of us, and would advocate at the executive level.

    This relationship often takes a while to build. Executives above the buying authority don’t have time for vendors who aren’t specifically relevant. So the relationship has to be built on something other than the current deal — shared industry interests, introductions to other executives, a perspective you can bring to their strategic questions.

    It’s slow and inefficient in the short term. It pays the moment your champion moves, which is more often than most sellers expect.

    I don’t often tell this story at scale because it’s specific and personal. But I think about it every time I look at a pipeline. Every single-threaded deal is one job change away from dead. I learned it in telecom. The lesson never stops being relevant.

  • Why Construction BD Is a Contact Sport

    Looking back: April 2026

    Of the industries I’ve sold into, construction required the most physical presence. You couldn’t win construction business from a laptop. You couldn’t run construction BD through email and the occasional phone call. The industry had a specific cultural requirement: if you weren’t on site, you weren’t in the game.

    That cultural requirement taught me something about trust-building that I’ve been grateful for ever since.

    Physical Presence as Trust Signal

    In a digital-first world, physical presence is expensive. Travel costs time and money. Being on a job site means not being in your office, your home, or at other meetings. Every hour spent in person is an hour not spent on other things.

    In most of my career, I’ve been in industries where digital communication increasingly replaced face-to-face. Medtech moved toward virtual sales calls. Consulting adapted toward remote engagements. Telecom had been digital-first for years. Construction was different.

    Construction buyers — GCs, project managers, owners’ reps — still wanted to see you on site. Not just for the initial meeting, but periodically, throughout the engagement. Showing up in person was a credibility signal they couldn’t quite articulate but definitely measured. Vendors who only ran digital BD lost to vendors who came to the trailer, walked the job, had lunch with the crew.

    What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time — but now see clearly — is that the physical presence wasn’t really about the information exchanged. Most of the actual business conversation could have happened remotely. The presence itself was the signal: “I care enough about this relationship to spend the day in a hard hat.”

    What Gets Transmitted in Person

    The information that gets transmitted in person is almost entirely non-verbal. How you handle the site. How you interact with the crew. Whether you know to wear boots. Whether you understand the tempo of the project. Whether you can hold a conversation with a foreman who doesn’t want to hear your pitch.

    None of this is communicable digitally. A video call carries your words but not your presence. An email carries your content but not your comportment. The things the construction buyer was evaluating — your cultural fit with the industry, your respect for the work, your capacity to show up — required being there.

    This wasn’t superstition. The GCs I worked with had been burned by vendors who were slick remotely and useless on site. They’d learned to require physical presence as a filter for vendors who could actually deliver. Their time was too valuable to waste on vendors who sounded good in a deck but couldn’t handle a jobsite conversation.

    The Principle That Generalizes

    Construction was an extreme version of a pattern that exists in every B2B industry: the relationships that matter most are transmitted through modalities that resist shortcuts.

    • In medtech, it was ride-alongs with clinicians during procedures. Nothing you learned over dinner matched what you learned watching a surgery.
    • In consulting, it was showing up at the client’s office for meetings you didn’t strictly need to be at. Presence built trust that remote work didn’t.
    • In telecom, it was site visits to the customer’s network operations center. Understanding how they actually worked changed what you could sell them.

    In every case, the modality that built the deepest relationships was also the most expensive — time, travel, attention. Digital communication is cheaper. Which is why most sellers over-weight it, and why the sellers who invest in expensive modalities have disproportionate relationship depth.

    What I Do Differently Now

    Since construction, I’ve been more willing to pay the cost of physical presence in industries that technically don’t require it. Not every deal needs a site visit. Some do, and in those, showing up carries information that can’t be sent any other way.

    This has sometimes felt inefficient — hours of travel for a conversation that could have happened virtually. It’s almost always produced outcomes the digital version wouldn’t have. Relationships that deepen faster. Trust that builds at a rate digital communication can’t match. Specific bits of information — the gestures, the reactions, the side conversations — that don’t transmit over video.

    The inefficiency is the point. In an economy where most sellers optimize for efficiency, showing up in person is a differentiator.

    Construction was a contact sport. It taught me that trust has a physical component that doesn’t survive digitization. I’ve applied that lesson in other industries since, and the relationships I’ve built where I’ve invested in physical presence have consistently outperformed the ones I’ve tried to build digitally.

    The cost is real. The return, in the relationships that actually matter, has always been worth it.

  • The Bonding Company Always Wins

    Looking back: April 2026

    When I first started selling into the construction industry, I thought I understood enterprise deals. I’d sold into medtech. I’d worked in consulting. I knew about champions, buying committees, and slow procurement cycles. Construction taught me something different: the industry where the non-obvious stakeholder has the most power over whether your deal closes.

    In construction, that stakeholder is the bonding company. And if you don’t know the bonding company, you don’t know the deal.

    Who the Bonding Company Is

    For anyone outside construction: bonding companies underwrite the surety bonds that general contractors need to bid on projects. The bond guarantees performance — if the GC fails to complete the project, the bonding company has to make the project whole. Because of that risk, bonding companies have enormous informal authority over which GCs can bid which projects, which vendors they can use, and what terms they can accept.

    If a GC takes on obligations the bonding company doesn’t like, the GC may find themselves unable to get bonding for their next project. That’s career-altering for the GC — and it means the bonding company’s preferences often shape decisions the GC makes without ever formally being in the conversation.

    The Deal That Taught Me

    A GC I was working with was excited about a project I was supplying into. The clinical champion equivalent — the project manager — was enthusiastic. The owner was on board. The sign-off felt imminent.

    Then the bonding company asked to review the terms.

    The terms I’d agreed to included performance guarantees the bonding company considered atypical. Not catastrophic — just unusual enough that they wanted the GC to push back on them. The GC couldn’t push back without embarrassing themselves, so they asked me to soften the terms, which I did. Cost me about 8% of the margin and added 30 days to the close.

    What I learned from that experience: the bonding company was effectively a silent partner in every construction deal. They didn’t show up in meetings. They didn’t appear on my stakeholder map. But their preferences were absorbed into every decision the GC made — and when those preferences conflicted with my contract, I was the one who had to adjust.

    The Pattern That Generalized

    Once I understood the bonding company dynamic in construction, I started seeing equivalents everywhere:

    • In medtech, it was medical device reprocessing companies, whose terms affected whether certain devices could be used profitably at the hospital.
    • In telecom, it was the managed service providers, whose existing relationships and service agreements constrained what customers could adopt.
    • In consulting, it was the audit firm, whose opinions about engagement scope and conflict of interest affected which projects the client could take on.

    The pattern is always: there’s a third-party stakeholder with informal authority over whether your deal can close — and they’re not in any of your meetings, but they’re shaping the decisions of the people who are.

    How to Find Your Bonding Company

    In any enterprise deal, ask this question: “Who else has to be comfortable with this decision, even if they’re not in the room?”

    The question almost always surfaces a silent stakeholder. Sometimes it’s internal — procurement, legal, risk. Sometimes it’s external — an auditor, a regulator, a bonding company, a reinsurance provider, a channel partner with contractual preemption rights.

    Once you know the silent third party, you can structure the deal around their constraints. Not always in ways that satisfy them perfectly, but in ways that don’t trigger their objection after the champion has already agreed.

    The construction lesson was: if you wait until the bonding company weighs in, you’re already behind. Your champion has committed. Your pricing is set. Any friction introduced by the silent stakeholder comes out of your margin or your timeline, because the GC won’t take the hit.

    The same dynamic operates in every industry. The silent third party always wins — either by being satisfied up front or by extracting a price at close.

    The Practical Move

    On every enterprise deal I’m in now, I try to explicitly map the silent third parties. Not just internal stakeholders — external ones too. Who’s backstopping the buyer’s ability to say yes? Whose permission do they need in a form they’d never describe as “permission”?

    Sometimes the answer is nobody. That’s useful to know. More often, the answer is a party I hadn’t previously considered, and their preferences start shaping how I structure the deal.

    This has saved me more slipped quarters than almost any other habit I picked up across my BD career. Construction taught me the principle. Every industry reinforced it.

    Find your bonding company before the close. Structure around their preferences. Save yourself the margin, the timeline, and the surprise.

  • The Partnership Kill Criteria

    Every partnership should have kill criteria. Most don’t. The absence of kill criteria is the reason so many partnerships drift from active to dormant to forgotten without anyone formally ending them — and why companies often run five or six zombie partnerships that consume executive time for no return.

    Writing kill criteria before you launch is the discipline that keeps partnerships honest.

    What Kill Criteria Actually Are

    Kill criteria are specific, measurable conditions that, if not met by a specific date, will trigger a structured conversation about winding down or restructuring the partnership.

    They’re not “we’ll see how it’s going.” They’re:

    • “If joint pipeline is below $X by month Y, we formally review.”
    • “If joint-won revenue is under $Z in the first twelve months, we decide whether to restructure or wind down.”
    • “If we haven’t had a weekly ops meeting for four consecutive weeks, we escalate to sponsors.”

    The specificity matters because specificity creates forcing functions. “We’ll monitor performance” produces drift. “If X by Y, we review” produces action.

    Why Companies Resist Writing Kill Criteria

    Three reasons, all of them predictable:

    1. Kill criteria feel unfriendly.
    Announcing a partnership at the same time as committing to kill criteria seems like hedging the relationship. Partners sometimes read it as bad faith. But the companies that insist on kill criteria are usually the ones who take partnerships most seriously — they’re not leaving the program’s fate to politeness.

    2. Kill criteria force commercial clarity.
    Defining what success means requires agreeing on what success looks like. Which requires agreeing on who owns what, what counts as joint, and how attribution works. Most partnerships defer this clarity because it’s uncomfortable. Kill criteria force the conversation while both sides still have executive attention.

    3. Kill criteria create accountability.
    Partnerships without kill criteria can fail indefinitely without anyone being accountable. With kill criteria, someone has to make the call. That accountability is uncomfortable — which is why it’s valuable.

    How to Write Kill Criteria

    1. Set a 90-day and a 180-day checkpoint.
    Not just end-of-year. Early checkpoints catch problems while there’s still time to fix them. At 90 days, you’re assessing whether the partnership is running — named operators, weekly cadence, initial joint deals. At 180 days, you’re assessing whether it’s producing — first joint wins, pipeline, revenue attribution.

    2. Tie each checkpoint to three specific tests.
    At 90 days: is the operational cadence in place? Are there named joint deals? Is pipeline being shared?
    At 180 days: has any joint revenue been generated? Is the pipeline growing? Are kill-criteria-triggering conditions present?

    3. Name what happens if the criteria aren’t met.
    Not “we’ll talk about it.” Specific: “The executive sponsors will meet within two weeks of the checkpoint. The options on the table are (a) restructure the partnership, (b) extend by 90 days with specific revised commitments, or (c) wind down. No fourth option.”

    The Most Common Kill Criteria I’ve Seen Used

    Across the partnerships I’ve observed running well:

    • Operator engagement: if the weekly ops cadence has been skipped 3+ times in 90 days, escalate
    • Joint pipeline: if joint-registered opportunities are below a specific threshold at 90/180 days, review
    • Joint revenue: if no joint-won revenue has been recognized by a specific date, review
    • Strategic drift: if either company’s priorities have shifted such that the partnership is no longer relevant to core strategy, review

    Any of these alone isn’t a kill trigger. Two or more at a checkpoint triggers the structured review.

    What the Review Should Do

    The review isn’t automatic termination. It’s a structured conversation between the operators and sponsors on both sides:

    • What’s the root cause of the gap?
    • Is it fixable with structural changes (new operators, revised cadence, different joint offering)?
    • Is it not fixable (strategic drift, incompatible incentive structures)?
    • Based on the answer, what do we do?

    Restructure, extend, or wind down. The review forces the decision instead of letting the partnership drift.

    The partnerships that run well almost always have kill criteria. The partnerships that run badly almost never do.

    This isn’t coincidence. Kill criteria are the forcing function that keeps both sides honest, engaged, and accountable. Without them, partnerships default to theater — because there’s no mechanism that turns a failing partnership into a conversation.

    Write the criteria before the press release. If the other side won’t agree to them, you don’t have a partner. You have a logo swap.

  • What I Learned About Scope From Billable Hours

    Looking back: April 2026

    Consulting teaches you pricing in a way that’s painful but permanent. Every hour of yours was sold at a specific rate, and every hour that didn’t get captured on a timesheet was revenue the firm never recognized. The discipline that system imposed taught me more about scope than any other experience in my career.

    The Core Lesson

    In most businesses, scope is abstract. “What did we commit to?” is answered with some hand-waving about “the deliverables” and “what the customer wanted.” The real answer is usually negotiated in the moment, often at the expense of the delivery team.

    In consulting, scope was literal. Every conversation, every document, every meeting had a billable-hour cost attached. If scope was ambiguous, someone was either eating the hours or charging them anyway — and both outcomes had consequences. Eat too many hours, and the engagement’s margin collapsed. Charge hours that weren’t clearly in scope, and the client got angry.

    The discipline this forced: learn to scope precisely, or pay a specific, visible cost for not scoping precisely.

    Three Patterns That Stuck

    1. Every “yes” has a silent “no” attached.
    When a client asked for something that was out of scope, the temptation was to say yes. It’s friendlier. It’s easier. It builds the relationship. But every yes to unscoped work was a no to something else — either the margin of the engagement, the delivery team’s ability to finish the in-scope work on time, or the next client’s priority on your team’s time.

    Learning to say “yes — and here’s what would need to change to accommodate it” was the discipline that separated consultants who delivered profitable engagements from those who delivered loss-making ones. Saying yes without that clarifier was how engagements quietly went underwater.

    2. The hardest scoping conversation is the one that happens after the SOW is signed.
    The easy scoping conversations happen at the front end, when everyone is excited, the relationship is fresh, and both sides are being cooperative. The hard ones happen in month three, when the client wants something that’s slightly outside the original scope and assumes it will be handled.

    The way I learned to handle this: treat the mid-engagement scope conversation as a craft of its own. Not a confrontation. A graceful, explicit re-negotiation: “Here’s what was in scope. Here’s what you’re asking for. Here are the three ways we could accommodate it — change order, trade-off within current scope, or we phase it into the next engagement.”

    Delivered cleanly, that conversation usually strengthens the client relationship rather than weakening it. Clients respect professionals who know their scope. They quietly disrespect ones who don’t.

    3. Unscoped work accumulates interest.
    A single unscoped task absorbed here and there doesn’t look like much. Five of them compound into a margin problem. Ten of them produce a client who assumes the unscoped behavior is baseline — and then gets upset when the next engagement is scoped properly.

    Unscoped work accumulates interest in the same way debt does. The engagement manager who let it accumulate without comment was preserving short-term relationship warmth while creating a medium-term expectation problem. I watched this lesson play out in multiple engagements. The warmth always faded. The expectation always stuck.

    How This Applies in Other Industries

    Every industry has a scope problem. Software implementation. Construction. Marketing agencies. Product development. Medtech installations. The pattern is always the same: a customer asks for something slightly more than what was committed, the vendor accommodates, and six months later there’s a margin or timeline problem that nobody can quite trace.

    The fix is always the same, too: treat scope as explicit. Name it. Document it. When it changes, renegotiate. Don’t let it drift.

    The vendors I’ve watched do this well come across as more professional, not less friendly. The ones who let scope drift come across as accommodating in the short term, and chaotic in the medium term.

    If you’re in any commercial relationship and you can’t cleanly answer “what’s in scope right now,” you probably have scope drift. The fix is cheap: an explicit conversation. The cost of not having it is a relationship that slowly becomes dysfunctional without anyone being able to explain why.

    Billable hours taught me this the expensive way. I’m grateful for the lesson. I’ve since applied it in every industry I’ve worked in, and it’s been one of the most durable, generalizable things I learned in consulting.