Chris Arsenault

Category: The Musings

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

  • The Founder’s Bag: When the CEO Should Still Be Closing

    At certain revenue stages, the CEO carrying the bag is the company’s single greatest growth lever. At other stages, it’s the single largest tax on the business.

    Knowing which is which is one of the hardest transitions a founder makes — and most of them make it wrong, in both directions.

    The Three Phases

    Here’s the model I’ve watched play out across every company I’ve run, advised, or sold into:

    Phase 1: Founder-must-sell (0 → $1M ARR).
    Nobody else can sell it. The product is still being defined in customer conversations. The pitch changes week to week. The first twenty customers are buying you — your clarity, your commitment, your willingness to walk through walls for them — as much as they’re buying the thing you’ve built. Delegating this phase destroys signal. You are the product manager, the sales rep, and the marketer. Pretending otherwise burns cash and confuses the customer.

    Phase 2: Founder-must-accompany ($1M → ~$10M ARR).
    You’ve hired your first real sellers. They can run 80% of a deal cycle. But the executive sponsor on the other side of the table wants to meet the CEO before they commit seven figures. Executive-to-executive selling is how you close this stage. Not showing up costs deals. Showing up to every deal is the opposite problem — you become the bottleneck, and you never learn whether your reps can actually close without you.

    Phase 3: Founder-must-choose ($10M+ ARR).
    Your presence has to be leverage, not substitute. If you’re in a deal, it should move because you’re there — not because nobody else could have moved it. This is the hardest transition. Most founders either disengage too fast (and their reps feel abandoned, which shows up as regrettable attrition six months later) or stay in too long (and their reps never develop the spine to close alone, which shows up as a permanent CEO dependency that kills enterprise value).

    The Mistakes I’ve Watched

    I’ve watched founders navigate all three phases — some gracefully, most not — and advised through the transitions where I could help.

    The Phase 2 mistake I see repeatedly is handing off too fast. The founder is proud of having built a sales team. They want to prove — to themselves, to their board, to their investors — that the business isn’t dependent on them. So they pull out of deals that still need executive sponsorship. Those deals slip. They get pulled back in reactively, but the damage is a lost quarter and a shaken rep team.

    The Phase 3 mistake is the opposite — refusing to hand off, because the founder still enjoys being in deals. They’re good at it. The customers love them. But every hour in a deal is an hour not spent on the company. At some revenue level, the highest-leverage thing the CEO can do is make themselves unnecessary in the deal room.

    The tell is the same in both cases: the founder’s calendar is lagging the business’s needs by about six months. By the time the mistake becomes obvious in the numbers, it’s been a mistake for two quarters.

    The Diagnostic

    The question I ask founders I work with — and the one I’d recommend any CEO ask themselves quarterly — runs three ways:

    “Can my reps close a six-figure deal without me in it?”
    If no: you’re in Phase 1 or early Phase 2. Don’t pretend otherwise. The pretending is what kills you — you hire a VP of Sales before the motion is repeatable, you blame them when it doesn’t work, you churn through three of them, and you’ve lost two years.

    “When I show up to a deal, does it visibly change?”
    If no: you’re not leverage. You’re occupying space a rep should own. The customer is polite, but they’re confused why the CEO is here. The rep is quietly frustrated. You’ve added no value and spent two hours you’ll never recover.

    “Does my calendar show me in deals my reps could own?”
    If yes: you are a tax, not a multiplier. Every hour you spend in a deal your VP of Sales should be running is an hour you’re not spending on the three things only you can do — vision, hiring senior leaders, and the handful of deals that actually need the founder.

    The job isn’t to carry the bag forever. The job is to know, at any given quarter, whether you’re the product, the sponsor, or the obstacle.

    Audit the last five deals you were personally in. Did your presence change the outcome? If the honest answer is no on three or more of them, you’re not being a founder. You’re being a liability.

    That’s the call you have to make yourself. No one else will make it for you — your reps are too polite, your board is too removed, and your customers genuinely do enjoy meeting you.

    Make the call anyway.

  • Why Most Partnerships Fail at Month Four

    The honeymoon ends at month three. Month four is when the work actually starts. Most partnerships never make it past that transition.

    I’ve seen this across every industry I’ve worked in — consulting, medtech, telecom, construction — and the pattern is so reliable I can almost predict which partnerships will fail just from the structure of the launch.

    The Lifecycle

    Here’s the pattern I’ve watched play out dozens of times:

    Months 1-3: Announcement and enthusiasm.
    Press release goes out. Executives take photos. Co-marketing assets get produced. Early joint calls have both teams engaged. Pipeline gets shared in a spreadsheet that looks impressive. Everyone is excited.

    Months 4-6: Reality sets in.
    The initial deals don’t close as fast as expected. Joint sales calls are harder to coordinate than internal ones. Each team’s reps revert to their owned-pipeline because that’s what their quota is tied to. Ownership gets fuzzy.

    Months 6-12: Drift.
    Nobody owns the joint motion. Quota conflicts emerge — whose number does this deal count toward? Strategic alignment at the executive level starts drifting. Quarterly business reviews get lighter. Joint pipeline reviews get skipped.

    Months 12+: The partnership exists on paper.
    Revenue never materialized. Nobody formally kills it because both sides still like the other logo on their website. Every 18 months someone from strategy asks “what’s going on with the X partnership?” Nobody has a clean answer.

    The Failure Mode

    The failure mode is almost always the same: nobody owned the joint motion after the executive honeymoon ended.

    I’ve seen this most vividly in consulting, where two firms announce a strategic alliance and spend the first quarter actively sharing pipeline. Then each firm’s partners revert to their owned-revenue priorities — partnership deals are messier, margins are lower, and the spoils have to be split. The incentive structure pulls both sides back to their core business, and the partnership quietly fades.

    Telecom channel partnerships have the same dynamic. The first six months have executive attention, co-selling agreements, joint training. Then executive attention moves elsewhere. The channel partners and direct sales teams compete for the same deals. Without active management, the conflict gets resolved by attrition — the partnership motion dies, direct sales wins by default, and the partnership becomes a logo slide at QBRs.

    Medtech partnerships often die for a different but related reason: the partnership’s joint solution requires implementation effort that neither company’s services team was resourced for. Everyone agrees the joint offering is compelling. Nobody agrees on whose engineer is on-site when the customer has a problem.

    What the Partnerships That Work Have In Common

    Every partnership that actually delivers revenue — the ones I’ve watched work — has four things:

    1. Named operators on both sides, not just sponsors.
    Sponsors show up for the announcement. Operators show up weekly. The operator is the person whose day job is making the partnership work — and it should be a day job, not a 10% allocation to someone whose main role is something else. Partnerships run on 10% allocations don’t run. They drift.

    2. A weekly or bi-weekly operating cadence.
    Not a quarterly business review. A short, operational check-in where pipeline, blockers, and handoffs get worked through. If the meeting gets skipped, the partnership is dying — the meeting is the canary.

    3. Joint pipeline review with explicit joint-accountability metrics.
    Who’s responsible for each joint deal. What the next action is. What’s blocking. Which side is behind on their commitment. This is the conversation that’s awkward to have and easy to skip. Skip it, and the partnership dies without anyone noticing.

    4. Explicit 90- and 180-day review checkpoints with kill criteria.
    At 90 days and 180 days, review whether the partnership is hitting the joint metrics agreed at launch. If not, the kill criteria trigger an honest conversation: change the structure, change the scope, or wind it down.

    The Diagnostic

    For every active partnership you’re in right now, answer four questions:

    • Who’s the named operator on their side and yours?
    • When did you last have a formal ops review?
    • What’s your joint pipeline, and what’s the win rate on it?
    • What are the explicit kill criteria?

    If you can’t answer those four questions cleanly, you already know how that partnership ends.

    Without those four, what you have isn’t a partnership. It’s a press release with a long tail.

  • Account-Based Everything (Not Just Marketing)

    ABM — account-based marketing — was always supposed to be account-based revenue. The term got hijacked by marketing tech vendors, and now most organizations run ABM as a marketing program and wonder why it doesn’t deliver revenue.

    The honest version is this: ABM without cross-functional alignment is just expensive advertising to a narrower list.

    What Actually Works

    The organizations I’ve watched make ABM work — and I’ve seen it work, though less often than the conference circuit would suggest — treated it as a cross-functional operating model, not a marketing tactic. Here’s what that actually looks like:

    Marketing targets the accounts.
    Identifies the tier-1 and tier-2 list, runs custom campaigns, produces account-specific content, measures engagement lift.

    BD multi-threads into them.
    Uses the marketing engagement as warm signal. Identifies stakeholders per account, runs outbound motions that reference the account context (not generic templates), books meetings across the buying committee.

    Sales runs the motion.
    Converts the meetings into pipeline, manages the deal cycle with the account-specific context marketing surfaced.

    CS/AM expands them.
    Once an account lands, CS owns expansion — which means CS is involved in target selection from the beginning, because the accounts worth landing are the accounts with expansion capacity.

    Product feeds insights back.
    What the account needs that the product doesn’t do, what custom work they’ve requested, what patterns emerge across tier-1 accounts — that feedback loop informs roadmap.

    Most organizations do one or two of these. Usually just marketing. Then they wonder why the program isn’t hitting revenue targets.

    An ABM Program That Died Correctly For the Wrong Reasons

    I watched a telecom ABM program that sent executives quarterly custom reports, ran executive dinners, built account-specific microsites, and generated strong engagement metrics. BD never followed up systematically. Six months of marketing spend evaporated. The accounts stayed warm, but deals never materialized because nobody owned conversion from engagement to pipeline.

    The program was eventually killed — correctly, from a ROI perspective, but wrongly, because the program wasn’t the problem. The absence of BD/sales/CS coordination was. The same marketing spend with a coordinated motion would have returned. Same inputs, different wrapper, different outcome.

    The Three Structural Commitments

    ABM delivers when three structural commitments are in place — and it doesn’t deliver when any of them are missing.

    1. Shared target account list.
    Marketing, BD, sales, and CS all work from the same list. Not marketing’s list that they share. Not sales’ list that marketing works against. The same list, agreed at leadership level, reviewed quarterly. Changes require joint approval.

    2. Shared tier definitions.
    Tier 1 and tier 2 should mean the same thing to every function. If marketing’s tier 1 is “highest engagement score” and sales’ tier 1 is “highest ACV potential,” you have two programs pretending to be one. Tier definitions should be written down and reviewed at the same cadence as the list.

    3. Shared operating cadence.
    Weekly or bi-weekly cross-functional ABM review. Account-by-account status. Not a marketing meeting that sales is invited to — a revenue meeting that all functions co-own. The cadence matters more than the format. Monthly is too slow to catch drift; quarterly might as well not exist.

    These sound like table stakes. They almost never exist in practice.

    The Test

    Pull your ABM target list. Ask, for any specific account: who owns this account in BD, sales, and CS?

    If three different people give three different answers, you don’t have ABM. You have a marketing program with a good name.

    Account-based revenue — when it works — can compress a multi-quarter pipeline motion into one quarter. It’s one of the highest-leverage motions available in B2B. But only when it’s actually cross-functional.

    Anything less is a rounding error on your marketing spend. And rounding errors, at scale, are how marketing budgets get cut when the revenue forecast misses.

    ABM is not a marketing strategy. It’s a revenue strategy that marketing is part of. The organizations that understand that difference win.

  • Marketing Should Serve Sales, Not Measure Itself

    Most marketing organizations have forgotten that their job is not to generate leads. It’s to create conditions where sales cycles are shorter, win rates are higher, and customers are better informed before they buy.

    Everything else — MQLs, impressions, attribution models — is proxy at best, vanity at worst. And when the proxy becomes the goal, revenue gets left behind.

    The Pattern of Misalignment

    I’ve watched marketing teams celebrate quarters where MQLs doubled while revenue flatlined.

    I’ve watched sales teams get punished for “not working the leads” when the leads were unqualified and the marketing team was measuring on volume not conversion.

    I’ve watched CMOs get fired for not hitting MQL targets that had no relationship to pipeline, and CROs get fired for not converting leads that were never real buyers in the first place.

    The root cause is misalignment masquerading as structure.

    Marketing and sales are supposed to be the two halves of the same motion — the front half and back half of the same buyer journey. When they’re measured separately, with separate incentives and separate metrics, they behave like separate organizations. Which they are, structurally. Which is the problem.

    Three Alignment Tests

    Test 1: Does marketing report revenue outcomes, not activity outcomes?

    If the monthly marketing review opens with MQL count, impressions, and content produced — that’s activity. If it opens with pipeline generated, influenced revenue, and win rate contribution — that’s outcome.

    Most marketing teams report activity because it’s easier to control. It’s also why CEOs stop trusting the marketing dashboard.

    Test 2: Does sales own part of the marketing plan?

    Not veto power — ownership. Field marketing, ABM, customer marketing should have shared accountability with sales leadership. If the marketing plan gets built in isolation and “socialized” to sales afterward, you have a hand-off, not an alignment.

    The test: when the marketing plan lands, does sales leadership have skin in the outcome? Or do they nod politely and wait for the next quarter?

    Test 3: Do field marketing and ABM teams report jointly to sales and marketing?

    The best revenue organizations I’ve seen dual-report their field marketing teams — dotted line to the regional sales leader, solid line to the CMO. That structure forces the conversations that pure CMO-reporting structures let teams avoid.

    If the answer is “no” to any of the three, you have misalignment — and misalignment compounds. The longer it goes, the more each function builds artifacts (reports, dashboards, processes) that justify their existence independent of revenue, and the harder it is to undo.

    The Fix Is Shared Metrics

    The fix isn’t reorg. Reorg is expensive, disruptive, and usually treats a symptom. The fix is shared metrics.

    Three metrics every CRO and CMO should review jointly, weekly:

    1. Sourced pipeline by channel — marketing’s job to generate. Broken out by source so both teams see where the leverage actually is.

    2. Stage conversion velocity — shared. Marketing influences early-stage movement. Sales owns middle-to-close. Both are accountable for how fast pipeline moves through the funnel.

    3. Win rate by lead source — shared. This is the most important metric and the least-reviewed one. Tells you whether the leads are actually qualified. If marketing-sourced leads have a 5% win rate and outbound-sourced leads have a 25% win rate, you have answers about where to invest.

    When those are reviewed together, the conversations change. Marketing stops optimizing for MQL count. Sales stops dismissing marketing-sourced leads. The metric architecture does the alignment work that meetings can’t.

    The cleanest organizations I’ve watched operate here made the shift from activity to outcome metrics and cut their sales cycle time by 20-30% without changing product, team, or territory. Just the metrics.

    If you’re a founder and your marketing dashboard doesn’t show revenue outcomes, ask your CMO to re-cut it for next quarter using pipeline-influenced and revenue-influenced metrics. If they resist, you have your answer about what they’re optimizing for.

    Marketing’s job is not to prove marketing exists. It’s to make revenue easier. Everything else is overhead.

  • The Silent Second Stakeholder

    The deal is closing. Your champion is thrilled. The forecast looks clean. Legal has the redlines. Your VP of Sales has already mentally booked the number.

    Then it doesn’t close.

    Every time I’ve seen this pattern — and I’ve seen it across medtech, telecom, construction, and consulting — the culprit was the same. A stakeholder who was invisible during discovery became decisive at close.

    I call them the silent second stakeholder.

    They’re not the economic buyer. They’re not the champion. They’re the person with veto power your champion didn’t think to mention, because your champion genuinely didn’t think about them.

    The Pattern, By Industry

    In medtech, it’s hospital IT. Your clinical champion is ready to sign. Then IT asks how your device talks to their EMR over HL7, and suddenly the deal slides two quarters while integration questions get answered.

    In telecom, it’s the facilities team at the customer site. The CIO signed. The rack isn’t ready. The install slips. The renewal conversation starts from behind.

    In construction, it’s the bonding company, insurance carrier, or owner’s rep. The GC wants to move. The bonding company hasn’t reviewed the terms. The close date becomes aspirational.

    In consulting, it’s procurement. Always. You thought you were selling to the COO. Procurement is now telling you your rate card is “non-standard” and asking for a 15% discount you weren’t planning to give.

    The pattern is identical in every industry: there is a stakeholder whose job is to say no, and they weren’t in your discovery calls.

    The Fix Is In Discovery, Not At Close

    The fix is not more diligence at close. By close, it’s too late — you’re already in reactive mode, your champion is frustrated, and the discount clock has started. The fix is mapping them in discovery.

    Three questions to ask your champion in the first 30 minutes of the first real call:

    1. “When this goes to procurement, what’s the first thing they’ll flag?”
    If your champion says “I don’t know,” that’s the answer — and that’s your homework. The question itself is also a gift to your champion; you’re teaching them how to defend the deal internally.

    2. “Who else on the technical, legal, or financial side needs to bless this before it moves?”
    Ask them to name names. Not titles. Names. If they can only give titles, they haven’t talked to those people yet — and that’s a leading indicator your deal has more fragility than the pipeline stage implies.

    3. “When was the last deal like this one stopped, and who stopped it?”
    This is the best question on the list. It surfaces institutional memory your champion might not volunteer. Every organization has a stopper — a person or a team that has killed deals like yours before. Finding out who, early, is worth three months of discovery.

    Get Them In the Room Early

    Beyond the questions, there’s a structural move: get the silent stakeholder in the room before you need them.

    In medtech, that means a technical call with IT in week two, not week ten.

    In telecom, a site walkthrough with facilities before contracts go to legal.

    In construction, a procurement or bonding courtesy call early enough that you’re not being introduced at the moment of pricing friction.

    In consulting, a procurement conversation that treats their standard questions as a checklist to clear, not an obstacle to work around.

    The best sellers I’ve worked with treat silent stakeholders as primary characters in the deal, not obstacles at the end. They build multi-threaded relationships that include the technical reviewer, the procurement liaison, and the operational sponsor — not just the decision-maker and the champion.

    Put silent-stakeholder mapping into your deal reviews. Ask it on every deal above your forecast threshold. The cost is 15 minutes of conversation. The savings are entire quarters of slipped revenue.

    Most lost deals aren’t lost to competitors. They’re lost to invisible people nobody thought to invite.

    The irony: silent stakeholders almost always will bless your deal if they’re engaged early. They only become deal-killers when they’re surprised. The surprise is the failure — not the stakeholder.

  • Multi-Threading or Mistake: The Single-Point-of-Failure Deal

    Every single-threaded deal is one job change away from dead.

    That’s not hyperbole. That’s attrition math. The average senior B2B buyer stays in a specific role for 2-4 years. If your enterprise deal cycle is 6-12 months, and your champion is late in their tenure, the probability they’re promoted, poached, or reorg’d out of their seat before the deal closes is non-trivial. Add another six months post-close for expansion and renewal — now the probability is high.

    Single-threading is the most common pipeline hygiene failure I see across every industry I’ve sold into.

    The Pattern

    In telecom, I’ve watched a 9-month deal die in week 34 because the CIO got promoted and moved to a different business unit. His replacement had different priorities. The deal didn’t get killed — it just stopped getting prioritized, which is the same thing.

    In construction, I’ve seen a deal slip two quarters because the project manager at the GC left for a competitor, and the incoming PM had a preferred vendor relationship. No drama, no objection — just quietly deprioritized into a no-decision.

    In consulting, the pattern shows up at the partnership level. The senior exec who sponsored the engagement retires or moves. The new exec doesn’t owe you anything, and the engagement gets reviewed on its merits — at which point, if you haven’t multi-threaded, you’re defending to a stranger.

    Medtech might be the worst of the four, because clinical sponsors frequently rotate departments. A 12-month implementation can easily outlast the tenure of the physician who championed it.

    The Five Threads

    On every deal above your forecast threshold — and I’d argue, every deal, period — you need three to five relationships at the customer, distributed across:

    1. Peer-to-peer. Rep-to-operator conversations, daily/weekly contact. The relationship that makes the deal feel real day-to-day.

    2. Executive sponsor. Your CEO/VP to their CEO/VP, relationship-level. The insurance policy for when something goes sideways and you need an adult conversation at altitude.

    3. Operational. IT, procurement, legal, or whoever runs the backend. The relationship that keeps your deal from dying on a technicality.

    4. Technical validator. The subject-matter expert who will sanity-check the solution. The relationship that gives the buying committee confidence.

    5. Future expander. Someone adjacent to the buying center who could use your product next. The relationship that turns a single landing into an account strategy.

    You don’t need all five on every deal. You do need at least three on every deal that matters.

    The Test

    The simplest test I know: pull every open deal in your pipeline. For each, list every person at the customer you’ve had a substantive conversation with in the last 60 days.

    If the list has fewer than three names, you don’t have a deal. You have a relationship.

    Single-threaded deals forecast aggressively and close softly. Multi-threaded deals forecast conservatively and close reliably. I have never in my career seen that pattern break.

    Two Habits That Compound

    Pre-deal multi-threading. In your first or second call, ask your champion “who else should I be talking to?” Ask it in a way that’s about serving the deal, not extracting contacts. Good champions will volunteer three names. Great champions will make the introductions.

    Deal-review multi-thread test. In every deal review, name every stakeholder. If the same name comes up for every role — decision, technical, financial, operational — you’re single-threaded. The deal review is where this gets caught while there’s still time.

    Most deals are not lost to competitors. They’re lost to reorgs, role changes, and silent re-prioritization. Multi-threading is the cheapest insurance in enterprise sales, and it pays every time.

    The deals you don’t multi-thread don’t die in week one. They die in week thirty. By then you’ve built them into the forecast, told your board the number, and emotionally closed the deal in your own head. The miss is louder because of the build-up.

    Thread the deal, or forecast the miss. Those are the options.

  • Discovery Is Diagnosis, Not Interrogation

    The best discovery call feels like a consultation. The worst feels like a deposition.

    If you leave discovery with a clean qualification grid and nothing else, you didn’t do discovery. You did intake. Real discovery is a clinical exercise — you’re diagnosing the customer’s situation, not qualifying their BANT.

    This is the mindset shift that separates sellers who win competitive deals from those who don’t. Interrogators ask questions to extract data. Diagnosticians ask questions to build understanding — both for themselves and for the customer.

    Three diagnostic moves I use on every discovery call:

    1. Symptom → Mechanism

    Don’t just catalog what the customer says is broken. Understand why it’s broken. The symptom is “our team can’t scale.” The mechanism might be “we have no system for onboarding the fifth hire after the founder stops being in every interview.” Those are entirely different problems, and only one of them is something you can actually solve.

    In consulting, this was the difference between a BD call that earned a follow-up and one that earned a project. Symptom-level conversations got polite nods. Mechanism-level conversations got the customer to say “say more about that” — and that’s when real discovery starts.

    2. Diagnosis → Prognosis

    Once you understand the mechanism, help the customer see what happens if they don’t fix it. Not FUD — just consequence tracing. “If you keep onboarding this way, what happens when you hire three more?” “If the HL7 issue doesn’t get resolved before go-live, what does the first week of production look like?”

    Medtech reps who could walk clinicians through the prognosis of not changing — the downstream clinical, operational, and financial costs — closed deals the competition couldn’t touch. Not because they were more aggressive. Because they were more useful.

    The customer often hasn’t traced the consequences themselves. They see the symptom. They haven’t sat with what happens if it compounds for another two quarters. Helping them sit with it, calmly and clinically, is the most valuable thing you can do in a first meeting.

    3. Prognosis → Urgency

    Why now? This is the question that separates deals that close from deals that slip.

    If the prognosis is bad but not urgent, the deal will slip indefinitely. If the prognosis is bad and there’s a forcing function — a contract expiry, a compliance deadline, a budget cycle, a competitor moving — the deal will close.

    Good diagnosticians find the forcing function. Great ones help the customer see it when the customer didn’t. In telecom, the forcing function was often a build-out schedule. In construction, a bonding or insurance deadline. In medtech, a regulatory filing or a surgical volume ramp. In consulting, a board meeting or an earnings call. The forcing function is always there — it’s just rarely top of mind.

    The way to tell whether you’re doing diagnostic discovery or interrogation discovery: count the ratio of qualifying questions to diagnostic questions in your recorded calls.

    Qualifying questions sound like: “What’s your timeline?” “Who else is involved?” “What’s your budget?”

    Diagnostic questions sound like: “Walk me through the last time this broke.” “What have you tried that didn’t work?” “If this stays broken, what breaks next?”

    Healthy ratio is roughly 1 qualifying question per 3 diagnostic questions. Most reps run 3:1 the other direction — they front-load qualifying, which is why their discovery feels like intake.

    The tactical benefit of diagnostic discovery is better data. The strategic benefit is that the customer leaves the call feeling like they understand their own situation better than before you showed up.

    That’s trust. That’s why they take the next meeting. That’s why they refer you.

    Audit one recorded discovery call this week. Count the ratios. If you’re interrogation-heavy, rewrite your opening five questions. You’ll see the difference in win rate within a quarter.

  • The Champion Map: Who Actually Moves a Deal

    Most enterprise reps think of “the champion” as a single person — usually the one who said “I love this” on the first call. That’s a dangerous simplification. Your champion isn’t one person. It’s a map of archetypes, and winning the deal depends on managing all of them.

    Here’s the map I use on every complex deal:

    The Champion. The person who wants the deal to happen and will spend political capital to make it so. Already sold, by definition. The deal is not won through this person — it’s won through the three below.

    The Mobilizer. The person who coordinates stakeholders across the buying committee. They may not own the outcome but they own the process. Matt Dixon’s research made this archetype famous for a reason: in complex B2B, the Mobilizer is often who actually gets the deal moving internally.

    The Skeptic. The person who needs to be converted before sign-off. Not hostile — analytical. They have legitimate concerns about risk, cost, or integration. They will ask the hard questions your champion won’t, and your job is to have answers before the question is asked.

    The Blocker. The person who will kill the deal if not managed. Sometimes their job is to say no (procurement, legal). Sometimes they have a competing priority or a preferred alternative. Always: they exist, and they’re dangerous when invisible.

    In medtech, I’ve watched this play out on nearly every deal: the clinical champion is already sold, the department head is the skeptic (worried about workflow disruption), supply chain is the blocker (concerned about vendor consolidation), and the COO is the mobilizer coordinating across all of them. Miss any one and you lose the deal.

    In telecom, the pattern looks different in titles but identical in structure: the CTO is the champion, the network ops lead is the skeptic, finance is the blocker, and the procurement lead is the mobilizer.

    In construction, the GC is the champion, the owner’s rep is the skeptic, the bonding company is the blocker, and the project manager is the mobilizer.

    In consulting, the sponsoring partner is the champion, the COO is the skeptic, procurement is the blocker, and the engagement manager is the mobilizer.

    The titles change. The roles don’t.

    The failure mode is almost always the same: the rep builds a strong relationship with the champion, ignores or underinvests in the other three, and gets surprised when the deal stalls at decision. The deal didn’t stall — the rep just wasn’t talking to the people who actually moved it.

    Three moves that separate operators who can map champions from those who can’t:

    1. Name every stakeholder, not just titles. “VP of Operations” is not a name. If you can’t name the person, you don’t know the deal. Titles suggest you’ve done research. Names prove you’ve had conversations.

    2. Classify each stakeholder into the map. Champion, Mobilizer, Skeptic, or Blocker. If everyone is a champion, you haven’t done the work — real buying committees always have skeptics and blockers. The fact that you haven’t identified any means you haven’t gone deep enough.

    3. Build an engagement plan per archetype. The champion needs ammunition (data, case studies, answers to hard questions). The mobilizer needs process clarity (timelines, decision paths, next steps). The skeptic needs evidence (references, proof points, risk mitigation). The blocker needs to either be converted or isolated — but they cannot be ignored.

    The good sellers I’ve worked alongside always knew exactly where every stakeholder sat on the map. The mediocre ones had a single champion and hoped for the best.

    Pull your top five deals right now. For each, sketch the map. Name names under each archetype. You’ll find something uncomfortable — usually two or more blockers you haven’t engaged, or a skeptic you’ve been avoiding because the conversation would be hard.

    That’s the work. That’s the difference between a pipeline and a forecast.

  • The Compound Interest of Trust

    In every industry I’ve sold into — medical devices, management consulting, commercial construction, telecom infrastructure — the deals I won fastest were almost never the deals with the newest relationships.

    That’s not sentiment. That’s math.

    Trust is the only revenue asset that compounds. Ads decay. Brand awareness fades without reinvestment. Pipeline evaporates if you stop feeding it. But a relationship you built three years ago, invested in quarterly, and never asked anything from? That relationship is earning interest whether you notice or not.

    Here’s the compounding mechanism, in four parts:

    Access premium. Trusted people get the meeting. That’s the zero-to-one. A cold email converts somewhere between 1 and 3%. A warm introduction from someone who vouches for you converts at 60 to 80%. That delta — that’s the access premium, and it only exists if you’ve been depositing.

    Speed premium. Trusted vendors skip steps. In medtech, I’ve watched trusted reps bypass three rounds of clinical evaluation because the department head had already vouched. Not because the product was better — the product was equivalent. Because the trust was collateral.

    Risk discount. A buyer choosing between two roughly equivalent options will choose the one where they trust the human. Not because they’re irrational. Because they are correctly pricing implementation risk. Your relationship is their insurance policy.

    Referral multiplier. One trusted relationship becomes three. Three becomes nine. This isn’t LinkedIn-post nonsense — it’s what actually happens when someone stakes their reputation on you in a room you’re not in.

    Now here’s the hard part: you can’t manufacture this in Q4.

    Trust doesn’t respond to urgency. It responds to consistency over time, with no extraction. The quarterly check-in that doesn’t ask for anything. The intro you made because you thought two people should know each other, not because you needed something. The follow-up six months after a deal closed — not a renewal pitch, a genuine “how’s it going.”

    Most operators treat relationship-building like an expense they’d rather not carry. They show up when they need something. They disappear when they don’t. Then they’re confused why the pipeline is thin when the market turns.

    The operators who build durable revenue treat relationships like a balance sheet. They know who they owe a call to. They know who owes them one. They know which five people, if they picked up the phone on Monday morning, would take the call — not because those people need something, but because the trust has been deposited.

    So here’s the diagnostic I use. Write the list:

    • Who owes you a call? (You did them a favor; they haven’t reciprocated yet.)
    • Who do you owe a call to? (They did you a favor; you haven’t returned it.)
    • Who would take a cold call from you on a Monday morning? (Not your family. Your professional network.)

    If the list is shorter than 20 names, you don’t have a pipeline problem. You have a deposit problem.

    Start this week. Don’t pitch. Just show up.