I was in Shoreditch this week doing some training for an enterprise sales team when someone asked a good question. Their champion was going to have to sell for them when they weren't in the room. What should they arm them with?
The temptation is to load them up like a mule with everything but the kitchen sink. A deck, a business case, a pack, some product training… On and on.
I told them not to bother. Your champion doesn't need more ammunition. They need one round, and your job is knowing which one.
So I told them this story.
A few years back I was selling a core banking platform into a bank. I had the CTO. He liked us, he'd argued our case internally.
His CEO wouldn't move. Not hostile, just never keen enough to give his CTO the go ahead to properly engage us.
I was writing bullshit in the CRM. Budget timing. Competing priorities. Months of confident notes, all wrong.
I knew there was something in the opportunity though, so I kept the relationship warm and continued to meet him for a coffee here and there. Waiting for the right time.
Then one morning, halfway through a sentence about something else, he dropped it.
"The thing is, my CEO reckons our valuation is tied to us building the tech ourselves."
We weren't even talking about our solution. It was just a throw-away comment between two professionals. Except it wasn't. It was THE anchor dragging on the entire process.
It rang in my head like a bell.
Not other priorities, not budget, not a competitor. Just one belief, in one man's head, about what made his business valuable.
I didn't say anything at that point - not a thing. Of course I had the urge to respond in the moment, to 'handle the objection', but it would have been sloppy and got me nowhere.
So I went and did my homework. I looked in our customer base and found a European business that had just closed an enormous round and gone unicorn. Smaller than the bank, but fast, aggressive, and everything that CEO wished his own company was.
They'd built their growth on our platform, and their valuation hadn't suffered for it. In fact it had soared.
So I put together two pages with numbers.
When they bought us.
How fast they had grown.
What their valuation had been.
I sent it to the CTO.
Two weeks later the lights went green. A sales process that had been stuck in the mud was suddenly moving as fast as an oiled penguin down a waterslide.
Most of us sell like a machine gunner. We get in front of a buyer and unload. Every feature, every proof point, every logo.
Fire enough rounds and something has to hit, right?!
But it's the snipers that take down big game.
Ask, listen, and wait. Because the thing that moves the deal won't come from you. It comes from them, sideways, in a sentence about something else, when nobody's taking notes.
That's the shot.
Months of meetings in that account got me nothing.
Twenty seconds of shutting up and listening handed me the whole deal.
Book the coffee. Ask about their world, listen to what they say and think - really think - about what it means.
And when that moment comes, don't unload. Take one shot.