Gary Miller here, and if you think your job is complicated, try explaining software to people who don’t want it while managing a contact who thinks transparency means copying the entire company on every email.
So I’m working this $180K deal with a manufacturing company that needs our inventory management software. My main contact, Sarah from operations, seems great at first. Responsive, asks good questions, understands the problem. Then I send her a simple follow-up email after our demo.
Twenty minutes later, my phone starts buzzing. Sarah forwarded my email to five people: the CFO, IT director, plant manager, procurement guy, and someone called “Bob from logistics.” Each one wants to schedule their own call to “understand the solution better.”
“Sure,” I tell Sarah on our next video call, “happy to talk with the team. Maybe we could do one group call?”
“Oh no,” she says, “everyone has different questions. Plus Bob’s really busy and can only do Tuesdays at 7 AM.”
Seven AM. On Tuesdays. For a guy who wasn’t even mentioned in the original project.
So I start the rounds. The CFO wants to know why we’re more expensive than the system they looked at three years ago but never bought. The IT director spends forty-five minutes explaining their server setup that has nothing to do with our cloud-based software. The plant manager keeps asking if it works on his tablet, which I answer four times.
Then there’s Bob. Bob from logistics joins the 7 AM call from what sounds like his car, eating something crunchy, asking me to repeat everything because he “wasn’t really involved in the earlier conversations.”
After each call, I send Sarah a recap. She forwards it to the same five people. Who then reply with more questions. Which generates more meetings. The CFO wants a second call. The IT director needs to “loop in his team.” Bob’s now available Thursdays at 6:30 AM.
Three weeks in, I realize I’m spending more time scheduling calls than actually selling. Sarah means well, but she’s created this feedback loop where every answer generates three new questions from people who weren’t paying attention the first time.
The breaking point comes when the procurement guy – who’s been silent for two weeks – suddenly announces they need to “evaluate three vendors” and asks if I can re-do my entire presentation for his boss, who’s Bob’s cousin or something.
I finally had to tell Sarah we needed to streamline the process. “Look, I’m happy to answer everyone’s questions, but we’re going in circles. Can we get the real decision makers in one room – virtual room – and hash this out?”
Turns out the real decision maker was someone named Janet who nobody had mentioned. She wasn’t on any of the forwarded emails. We had one thirty-minute call, she said yes, and we closed the deal.
Bob from logistics never did figure out what we were selling. Sometimes the best client relationship strategy is knowing when to stop managing all the relationships.
