Gary Miller here, wondering why I thought selling software would be easier than this.
So there I was last month, three months deep into what looked like my best deal of the quarter. Sarah, the operations director at this growing logistics company, absolutely loved our business software. We’re talking about a $180K deal – not life-changing money, but solid enough to make my numbers look respectable.
Sarah had been burned by their current system for two years. During our video calls, she’d practically light up talking about how our software would solve her team’s workflow problems. “Gary, this is exactly what we need,” she told me after our third demo. “I can already see my people being so much more productive with this.”
I thought I was golden. Sarah had budget approval, her team was excited, and we’d worked through all the technical requirements. I was already mentally spending my commission when she called me on a Tuesday morning.
“Gary, we have a problem,” she said, and I could hear the frustration in her voice. “Corporate just informed us that our parent company signed a enterprise-wide deal with your competitor last week. We have to use their system instead.”
Apparently, while Sarah and I were having our productive conversations, the corporate folks three states away were making their own software decisions. They’d bought a different solution for all their subsidiaries – something that sort of did what Sarah needed, but not nearly as well as our software.
“This is ridiculous,” Sarah continued. “Your solution is perfect for what we do here. Their system is built for companies twice our size with completely different needs. But I have no choice – it’s coming down from corporate and there’s no budget for anything else.”
I tried everything I could think of. Could we position our software as an add-on? Nope, corporate wanted standardization. Could we wait six months and revisit? Maybe, but Sarah would be stuck with the other system by then and wouldn’t have budget to switch. Could we talk to someone at the parent company? Sarah gave me a contact, but that person never returned my calls.
The worst part? Sarah kept apologizing. “I’m so sorry, Gary. I know how much work you put into this. Your software really is better for what we need.” She genuinely felt bad about wasting my time, which somehow made it worse than if she’d just ghosted me.
Two weeks later, Sarah messaged me that corporate had pushed back the implementation of their chosen system by four months due to “resource constraints.” So now she’s stuck with her old, broken system even longer, waiting for a solution that won’t work as well as ours would have.
I moved on to other prospects, but I still think about that deal sometimes. Sarah found the perfect solution for her team’s problems, had the budget and authority to buy it, and genuinely wanted to work with me. But none of that mattered because someone in a corporate office made a different decision.
And that’s business software sales for you – sometimes the best deals die in conference rooms you’ll never see.
Leave a Reply