This case study is inspired by conversations with enterprise sales leaders and SVPs of Sales across tech, finance and manufacturing companies.

The Challenge

Over the last number of months, sales cycles have become longer with increased competition, higher market volatility and a decrease in the number of sales deals closed.

Now more than ever, sales leaders need to deliver on committed deals, not just advance them. it is evident that the lift to close deals now requires a different game plan. It is no longer sufficient to assume that a committed champion with a strong product fit will secure multi-year and multi-stakeholder agreements. In a market shaped by restructuring, constrained resources and AI disruption, the path to a signed deal has become harder to achieve.

Observations from the field revealed a pattern that showed that, while all the technical groundwork had been laid out and objections answered, a deal failed to advance and remained in the forecast column.  There was no obvious blocker and that was the problem. All the stakeholders appeared to be onboard, but the deal was still not signed two quarters on.

The Resilience Factor Difference

Embedding with senior operators in the field, it was time to reframe the problem to uncover the solution. There was a need to dig deeper and ask nuanced questions. The ‘leverage point’ was to understand who the actual influencers were and their motivations. RF partnered to better understand who actually held the decision? What were they actually solving for? Who had final signing authority and what were their incentives? Were the different stakeholders solving for the same outcome?

Resilience Factor worked from a ‘leverage point’ that most deal strategies ignored. This is the difference between who holds authority on the organizational chart and who carries the risk of the decision in practice.

Contextualized conversations later revealed that the named economic buyer was not the constraint. The blocker was an operations leader, who had inherited a failed implementation and was unwilling to be accountable for a second one. That was the implicit motivation stalling the deal.

This particular stakeholder was working behind the scenes to manage the exposure to his function and did not view the deal favourably.

The reframe was not focused on introducing a new incentive. This reframe included a focused conversation with the operations leader. This delivered on a phased approach that featured structured accountability checkpoints that positioned proceeding as the lower risk option and continued delay became the exposure.