Day Nine

For three years, startups pitched us. Founders showed up with demos galore. I was the buyer they wanted: budget owner, decision maker, governance and implementation owner all in one. And all that inside a company big enough to matter. We sat through more than a hundred of these.

Now I sit here and can’t stop thinking about one of the very few that did it differently. I wish the rest could glean the answers from this post, but I might just write a longer-form piece so it doesn’t have to be inferred.

They showed up and spent the first meeting on us. Intently on us. What were we trying to fix, what had we already tried, where it hurt, how mature we were, who else had a vote. They listened like the meeting belonged to us.

Then they put a pilot in our hands. Six weeks, free, built around the one thing we were trying to solve, not a tour of everything the tool could do.

I killed the pilot on day nine.

I saw it working. Everyone who was in the pilot saw it, too. It was solving the problem we had, and people started to make a game of it. Five more weeks would have been a formality. So I called their team, ended the pilot, and asked for a purchase order.

Here is what they had done that almost nobody does. They stopped selling me what they make and started showing me what I need. Same product. Completely different sale. By day nine I was not evaluating their software. I was watching my own problem disappear.

I carry a long and specific list of how these deals die: the demo that starts before the listening, the budget holder nobody seeks to understand, the artifact that could have carried the deal and never gets sent, the thousand other problems you never ask about because you came to sell one, the pilot that runs long past the moment the answer was obvious. Most companies trip over several before the first hour is out. And the list is longer than that.

The one that sidestepped all of it did so with a single decision. They came to learn what I needed, then showed the proof around it.

What I need, not what they sell. The whole game is in that sentence.