"I'm trying to figure out whether it was actually YOU that did the deal."
The interviewer gave me a challenging stare. He clearly wanted me to justify myself.
He'd asked me to tell him about a deal I was proud of, so I'd walked him through a $20m deal I'd done a year or two earlier. Forensically. The entire coordinated effort I'd led over 18 months, the teams of people, the workshops, the bid responses, the proofs of concept. Everything.
And I made damn sure I credited the whole team. Anyone who's ever done a deal that size knows it isn't a one-man show. And even selfishly, I knew if I'd said it was all me-me-me, it would have shown me up as an amateur, because that's just not how big deals get done.
He looked unimpressed.
He'd heard me credit the team and decided I'd been a passenger. He wanted a neat answer, and after a long, uncomfortable silence, he tried again.
"Did YOU win the deal?"
I realised that he wasn't trying to trap me. He genuinely thought that credit needed to be allocated to a single person, and wanted to know whether that person was me.
"No, I didn't win the deal. WE won the deal. I led the deal." My tone probably shifted from pure professionalism to a twinge of frustration.
I wasn't having the whole thing reduced to a yes or a no, so I tried to explain it another way.
"If I hadn't been there, would the deal have happened anyway? Absolutely not. I can point to over half a dozen make-or-break decisions I made that most salespeople would have missed.
"But I can also point to exceptional people on my deal team who could say the same. Key people in our pre-sales and architecture teams did incredible work in the right room at the right time. Our executive team made themselves available when it counted.
"I personally don't believe that a single person wins deals like that - but it sounds like you disagree."
I get why he was suspicious. I've seen massive companies (I'm not naming any names) where the deal team is long, bloated and full of hangers-on, and "we" is a great place for a passenger to hide. But asking who won it won't find them. The credit on a 7-8 figure deal isn't binary.
There's no superhero carrying the deal on their own.
When you step up into deals that size, it stops being about you.
Your job is to orchestrate the deal. Sit above the work (as well as in it), understand the requirements, and put the right people in the right rooms with the right counterparts, well prepared, at the right time.
You call the plays.
The better question is... "Would it have happened without you?"
Next time you're hiring for big deals, ask that instead. And if you're the one in the chair, have your answer ready.