Chris Arsenault

Category: The Musings

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

  • 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.

  • The Partnership Track Lesson

    Looking back: April 2026

    I spent time earlier in my career in consulting, and one of the things I watched most closely was the partnership track. The lesson of who made partner and who didn’t has stayed with me ever since — because what separated the two groups wasn’t what the firm told anyone they were measuring.

    The Formal vs. Actual Criteria

    Officially, partnership decisions were about revenue generation, client outcomes, thought leadership, and team development. Measurable things. Discussable things.

    Watching it happen in practice, the actual separator was something else: the breadth and depth of client relationships that the candidate had built across the firm’s senior client base. Revenue came and went. Client outcomes were often shared across teams in ways that made individual attribution fuzzy. Thought leadership was nice but rarely decisive.

    What mattered, really, was whether the senior clients at the firm picked up the phone for this person — and whether they recommended them to their peers.

    The candidates who made partner were the ones who had built real, bilateral relationships with senior clients over years. They didn’t just deliver projects well. They had invested in those clients as people — referred business to them, introduced them to people worth knowing, been available in ways that weren’t tied to current projects, and shown up for clients in moments when the firm didn’t specifically require it.

    The candidates who didn’t make partner were often equally strong technically. They delivered excellent projects. Their clients were satisfied. But they hadn’t built the durable relationship infrastructure — and so when the partnership decision was being made, the senior clients’ voices were either absent or measured.

    Why This Generalizes

    I took two lessons from watching this:

    First, the things that get formally measured are usually proxies for the things that actually matter. Revenue is a proxy for client value delivered. Project outcomes are a proxy for trust earned. Thought leadership is a proxy for professional authority. Partnership decisions eventually go to the people who have earned the underlying thing — not the ones who’ve optimized the proxy.

    This shaped how I think about metrics generally. If you optimize the proxy without building the underlying thing, the proxy eventually breaks down. If you build the underlying thing, the proxies take care of themselves.

    Second, career capital compounds through relationships — not through credentials. The consultants who made partner often had less impressive CVs than some who didn’t. What they had was a network of senior clients who would recommend them, hire them, and advocate for them. That network was the real asset. The credentials were the visible surface.

    I’ve watched this play out in every industry since. The operators who build durable careers do it through relationships that compound. The operators who build credential-heavy careers often hit ceilings when the credentials alone aren’t enough.

    The Pattern in Non-Consulting Contexts

    Looking back, the consulting partnership track was an unusually legible laboratory for this pattern because the stakes were so visible — the decision was binary, the timing was known, and the outcomes were watched. But the same dynamic operates everywhere in professional services, enterprise sales, and executive progression generally.

    • In enterprise sales, the reps who get promoted to director and VP are almost always the ones with the deepest client relationships — not necessarily the ones with the biggest quota attainment in any single year.
    • In founder paths, the CEOs who build durable companies are almost always the ones who’ve built wide networks of peer relationships they can draw on — not necessarily the ones with the best product on day one.
    • In board service, the directors who get invited to the most boards are the ones who’ve treated prior boards well — being responsive, adding value outside the meetings, supporting other directors in difficult moments.

    The pattern is always the same: durable career capital is relational. The credentials, titles, and deal records are the visible output. The relationships are the underlying engine.

    If you’re earlier in your career and you’re optimizing for credentials — thinking the next job, the next title, the next deal is what matters — look at the people 15 years ahead of you who have the kind of career you’d want. Almost all of them built their position on relationships that span decades.

    That’s the asset. Build it deliberately. It pays for a long time.

  • The HL7 Problem — A Pattern That Repeats

    Looking back: April 2026

    Early in my career selling into medical technology, I lost a deal I thought I’d won. Not a deal slipped — a deal lost, definitively. The lesson has shaped how I think about enterprise selling ever since.

    The deal was with a regional hospital system. The clinical champion was enthusiastic. The department head had quietly approved. The CMO had met with me twice and was leaning in. Everything looked right. Legal had the redlines. I was forecasting it to close that quarter.

    Then IT got involved.

    What Happened

    The hospital ran an electronic medical records system I’d assumed would interoperate cleanly with our device. It didn’t. Specifically, the HL7 messaging format my clinical data needed to export into was implemented slightly differently in their EMR than in the two reference hospitals I’d cited. The integration wasn’t impossible — it was non-trivial, required their IT team’s involvement, and would add two to three months to the implementation timeline.

    None of this had come up in discovery. Not because I hadn’t asked — because I’d asked the wrong people. I’d asked the clinical champion about integration and she’d answered based on her general understanding, which was “our IT team handles that kind of thing.” That answer was technically true and functionally useless.

    The deal didn’t die. It slipped two quarters while the integration questions got worked through. But the damage was done: my CMO champion got frustrated with the timeline, my clinical champion started getting pressure from her department to explore alternatives, and by the time we got to a workable integration plan, a competitor had re-entered the conversation with a solution that had already been proven in that EMR environment.

    We got the deal back, eventually. But it closed six months late at a 20% discount I wouldn’t have had to give if I’d identified the HL7 issue in discovery.

    What I Learned

    Three things, which I now teach anyone I mentor in enterprise selling:

    1. Every enterprise deal has a silent second stakeholder.
    It’s never the champion. It’s not the economic buyer. It’s the person whose job is to say “hold on” at some technical, legal, or operational layer. In medtech, it was IT. In telecom, it’s facilities or network ops. In construction, it’s the bonding company. In consulting, it’s procurement. The pattern is universal.

    2. The silent stakeholder must be surfaced in discovery, not at close.
    The cost of finding them early is 15 minutes of conversation with your champion, asking “when this goes to [X], what’s the first question they’ll have?” The cost of finding them late is a slipped quarter, a discount, and sometimes a lost deal.

    3. Your champion’s answers about the silent stakeholder are almost always wrong.
    Not because your champion is wrong about their own job. Because they’re answering based on how they’d want the process to go, not how it actually goes. “Our IT team will handle that” is directional truth. It is not actionable intelligence. You have to get to the IT team yourself — not through the champion’s interpretation of what IT will need.

    Why This Pattern Matters So Much

    Looking back, the HL7 problem was probably the single most expensive lesson of my medtech career. But the principle it taught — silent stakeholders exist in every enterprise deal, they must be surfaced early, and your champion can’t fully characterize them — is something I now apply in every deal review, in every deal I’m in directly, and in every coaching conversation I have with someone earlier in their career.

    I’ve watched sellers in construction learn this lesson with bonding companies. In consulting, with procurement. In telecom, with network operations. The industry changes; the pattern doesn’t.

    The irony is that the fix is cheap. A seller who asks two or three specific questions in discovery about the silent stakeholders will catch most of these issues before they compound. But most sellers don’t ask, because the questions feel awkward, and because the champion is giving them warm signals that make the deal feel safe.

    Warm signals from the champion are not the same as visibility into the full buying process. I learned that once. I don’t forget it.

    If you’re selling enterprise anything and you haven’t identified your silent stakeholders in discovery, you don’t have a deal yet. You have a relationship that might become a deal, pending surprise.

    Don’t be surprised. Ask early. Ask specifically. Get past the champion’s version of the process to the actual one.

    That’s the HL7 lesson. It cost me a quarter. It’s saved me many more.

  • Why Medtech Champions Move Departments and How That Shapes Everything

    Looking back: April 2026

    One of the most durable lessons I took from selling into medical technology was this: your clinical champion will change roles before your deal closes. Not sometimes. Usually.

    This is true in every industry — champions get promoted, move sites, leave. But medtech has a particularly high rate of internal rotation. Clinicians shift sub-specialties. Hospital systems reorganize. Academic physicians move between institutions. The cadence is faster than in most B2B contexts, which made medtech a reliable teacher about multi-threading.

    The Pattern

    A typical medtech enterprise cycle runs 6 to 18 months. A clinical champion’s seat in a specific role at a specific institution is often 18 to 36 months. Do the math on overlap and you realize: in a non-trivial percentage of deals, the person who championed you at month one is in a different role by the time your deal is operational.

    I saw this go sideways on specific deals. A surgical champion who was thrilled in the discovery phase got recruited to a different hospital system at month five. His replacement had a different preferred vendor. The deal didn’t die — it just stopped moving, and nobody could tell me why for three months.

    Another deal — an internal medicine champion got pulled into an administrative role mid-cycle. She wasn’t moving institutions. She was just moving offices, and the new role didn’t include authority over clinical purchasing. The deal required a new champion, whom we had never met.

    What I Learned About Building Deals

    The first obvious lesson: multi-thread everything. In medtech, this meant cultivating at least three clinical relationships on a given deal, plus administrative, plus materials management. No single-threaded deal survived contact with institutional reality.

    The less obvious lesson, the one that took me longer: build relationships with people who will outlast any specific role. The senior clinicians who remained in an institution for decades were worth more than a junior champion in the current buying center. A dean, a department chair, a longtime nursing director — their presence was stable across reorganizations.

    I started building relationships at those levels even when they weren’t directly involved in my deals. Two years later, I’d find that one of them had become the sponsor I needed on a deal I hadn’t even started yet.

    Why This Applies Everywhere

    Medtech taught me the pattern, but I’ve since watched it play out in every industry:

    • In telecom, CIOs rotate between business units every 3 to 4 years. The relationships with their VPs — who often stay longer — outlast them.
    • In construction, project managers change but the owner’s representative often stays for years. Build that relationship and you have durable access.
    • In consulting, the engagement manager on any specific project will rotate. The senior partner sponsoring the client relationship rarely does.

    The common pattern: in any enterprise selling motion, there are transient relationships and durable ones. The transient ones drive individual deals. The durable ones drive careers.

    The operators I’ve watched build the strongest enterprise selling records were the ones who invested in durable relationships even when they didn’t need them for the current deal. The ones who invested only in transient relationships had bursty results — strong when the specific person was in place, invisible when they moved.

    The Principle I Now Apply

    In every account I work, I try to answer one question explicitly: who, at this account, will still be there in five years?

    The answer is sometimes the obvious senior executive. Often it’s someone adjacent to the buying center — a longtime operations director, an influential technical lead, a specialist who’s built a career at the institution. These people are often not the deal decision-maker in the current cycle. They are the decision-makers across decades.

    Medtech made this legible because the rotation was so frequent that the lesson arrived early. Every industry has the same pattern. It just compresses or expands the timeline on which the lesson becomes obvious.

    Looking back, the reason I still emphasize multi-threading so heavily — in content, in coaching, in deal reviews — is that medtech taught me, early, how expensive single-threading is in an industry where people move. The insight generalized. The urgency came from the compressed laboratory of clinical sales.

    If you’re selling into any industry with high role rotation — and most B2B industries qualify — the multi-threading lesson is the same lesson medtech teaches. Learn it early or pay for it later.