Heal Your Deal

It’s a familiar scenario: you locate and contact a promising potential client, make initial contact and are able to schedule a follow-up meeting. Everything is going great. The client is interested and serious negotiations ensue. Four months down the road, you are still stuck in the same place: endless negotiations, missed deadlines, and, most frustrating of all, a client that appears as interested and as noncommittal as ever. Your deal has come down with a bad case of the Never Ending Deal Syndrome, or NEDS.

You now have three options: (1) Cut your losses and kill the deal, (2) slog it out and hope for the best, or (3) find a way to solve the problem. Assuming that you still have faith in the original proposal, the third approach is clearly preferable. If there’s a realistic possibility of a solution, which in my experience there usually is, why not look for it?
Although every deal is different, most breakdowns can be traced to one of a few known culprits. Once you have identified the one in your case, there’s a good chance that you can find a workaround. In this column I’ll point out two of the most common causes of NEDS and some strategies that will more often than not get your deal unstuck.

Culprit No. 1:
The Gatekeeper
They are everywhere. Almost every company has them, and if you have been in business for any length of time you have met them. Gatekeepers can be found in almost any position in the company, and no two gatekeepers are alike. However, gatekeepers all share one common trait: they do not have the authority to sign your deal. Their job is to mediate between your company and the real decision makers within their organization, and for that reason talking to gatekeepers is counterproductive. If you are uncertain whether you are talking to a gatekeeper, in most cases asking “who will sign the final document?” will give you the answer.
The most effective cure is to remove the gatekeeper from the equation. Of course, this is easier said than done. How does one bypass a gatekeeper without creating a lot of ill will and other collateral damage? The following strategies may help:

ESCALATE As a rule of thumb, your company’s CEO should not be the one making initial contact with new potential clients. The CEO (or other senior executive) is your strategic reserve. If you find that the negotiations are stalled, it is possible to revive the deal by escalating the discussions to a higher level. For example, suggest that your CEO will be visiting the area in a couple of weeks, and would love to have lunch with the gatekeeper’s superior. If your CEO is the one negotiating the deal on a daily basis, no such escalation is possible.

FLANK By opening a secondary line of communications with the client, you may be able to bypass the gatekeeper. For example, a technology company that is stuck in never-ending business discussions with the client might seek to open a technical channel of communications. To illustrate, the company might offer to set up a comprehensive product demonstration; seek technical clarifications from the client’s technical staff, etc. The goal is to use this new channel to bypass the gatekeeper, to develop secondary sources of information, and to acquire allies within the client’s team.

USE STEALTH A highly effective strategy is to gradually pull additional members of the client’s team into the negotiations. For example, sending copies of new contract drafts to a number of key people within the client organization may have the desired results. Similarly, holding meetings at the client’s facilities increases the chance that you will meet and be able to engage the client’s decision-makers.

PARACHUTE IN As a strategy of last resort, and at the risk of antagonizing the gatekeeper, you may choose to go over the gatekeeper’s head directly to the decision makers. You should only attempt this risky maneuver if you have determined that this is the only way to resuscitate the deal and you have nothing too lose.

Culprit No. 2:
The Busy Decision Maker
While gatekeepers are a primary cause of NEDS, an even more problematic cause of the syndrome is a busy decision maker. The decision maker may be genuinely interested in partnering with your company but, especially if it’s a small business, may be too busy or too distracted to pay full attention to the deal at hand. This is a more difficult problem since the decision maker cannot simply be bypassed. Nevertheless, even in such cases there are a number of useful strategies that can alleviate if not completely eliminate the problem.

CREATE A SENSE OF URGENCY Over the years I have found that an executive threatened with the loss of a valuable deal is a delightfully nimble creature. However, creating a real sense of urgency is a tricky matter. Simply setting a deadline or threatening to walk away from the deal is unlikely to be taken seriously. To be credible, you need to demonstrate that your company has a plausible alternative to the deal.