Last week we talked about the deal that goes quiet. The room you can’t hear.
Here’s one of the most common reasons it goes quiet in the first place: you only ever had one person in it.
One contact. One champion. One phone number you actually trust. The deal feels healthy because that one person likes you. They take your calls. They say all the right things.
Then they go on leave. Or they change roles. Or they lose an internal fight you never knew was happening. And the deal you were forecasting at ninety percent is suddenly a name you can’t get on the phone.
Gartner found that the typical buying group for a complex B2B purchase now runs six to ten people. Six to ten. And most of that group is trying to do something harder than choosing you: they’re trying to agree with each other. The deal doesn’t get decided in your meetings. It gets decided in the rooms between them, where your one champion is carrying your entire case alone, in their own words, on a day you’ll never see.
If you’ve only armed one person, you’ve outsourced your whole deal to someone who doesn’t work for you.
I learned this the expensive way on a large chain of convenience stores.
We were selling weekly facility services. Restroom supplies, floor care, cleaning products. Their procurement director was the best kind of buyer. Open. Honest about the pain. He helped us build a program that didn’t just fix what hurt, it gave them options their current provider couldn’t touch.
And because of his title, I never went looking for anyone else. Why would I? We had the one person who could say yes or no, and he was saying yes. This one felt done.
Then came the email no one expected. He was leaving for a better opportunity. All of his duties were being handed to someone else. A person we didn’t know, who didn’t know us, and who, to be honest, didn’t see this project as a priority.
We got one meeting to revive it. The new contact looked at months of work and called it “something down the road we’d look into.” They had more pressing priorities and didn’t see the value in continuing. We offered to walk them through the entire process, every finding, everything we’d learned. They politely said no.
It died in that room.
The lesson wasn’t “find a better champion.” Mine was excellent. The lesson was that one champion is still one, and the title at the top of the org chart is the thread most likely to snap. We should have built a team of operators who saw the value and were pushing for it from their own seats. Because here’s what I know now: the people most affected are the best champions. No matter who changes above them, they’re still fighting for what makes their day to day better.
Three moves for a single-threaded deal.
- Map the room before you need it. Early, while things are good, ask the question most reps skip: “Besides you, who else will weigh in on this decision?” Then ask to meet them. Not to go around your champion, to help them. Frame it that way out loud: “I don’t want to make you carry this alone. Who should I be helping you bring along?” A real champion welcomes the help. A false one suddenly gets vague, and now you’ve learned something too.
- Give every thread its own reason to care. Multi-threading isn’t more meetings with the same pitch. The CFO is worried about a different thing than the user, who’s worried about a different thing than the executive sponsor. One message across three people convinces no one. Find each person’s actual stake and speak to that one. You’re not repeating yourself. You’re handing each of them the argument they’ll make to the others when you’re not there.
- Build the second champion before you lose the first, and build it among the people closest to the pain. People go on leave. People get promoted. People walk out the door for a better job and take your deal with them. The time to add a voice is while the deal is healthy, not after it goes dark. And be deliberate about whose voice. The title at the top is the thread most likely to snap. The operators who feel the problem every shift are the ones who keep fighting for the fix no matter who sits above them. Get your case out of one person’s head, in front of the people whose day actually gets better when you win. Redundancy isn’t paranoia. It’s how you stop a personnel change from becoming a lost deal.
The deals that survive a surprise are never the ones held together by a single relationship. They’re the ones where three people in the building already know why you should win, and at least one of them will say it out loud when you’re not in the room.
Here’s your homework: pick your biggest open deal. Count the people inside the account you’ve actually spoken with. If the answer is one, that’s not a deal. That’s a hope with a contact name. Add a thread this week.
This essay ran as edition 4 of The Frontline Sales Forecast, the weekly newsletter. One issue a week, published here on the Friday, then emailed and posted to LinkedIn the same morning. Same piece everywhere. Get the next one.