You ran a great intro call. The person on the other end was engaged, asked sensible questions, even laughed in the right places. At the end you asked about next steps and they told you, “Send me the deck, I’ll pass it around and see what people think.”
You said yes, sent the deck, ended the call and thought, “great call, strong champion”. But three weeks later, nothing has happened and your emails are going unanswered. The deal is dead.
This post covers:
What to do before the call, so you’re not guessing during it
How to ask about other stakeholders without getting stonewalled
What vague answers really tell you
How to ensure the next step actually happens
Spoiler: none of this is rocket science. It just runs against the grain in a call that seems to be going well, which is exactly what stops people doing it.
Map the org before the call
A few minutes with LinkedIn, Sales Nav or Apollo is enough to build a rough sketch of who in the company is a peer, who’s a boss, and who sits in an adjacent team that may have an opinion.
You won’t get it exactly right. Titles are confusing. That’s fine. You’re not going for 100% accuracy. You’re going for not walking in blind, so that when they say a name, you know roughly how they’ll be involved in the buying process.
Don’t ask, “Who is your boss?”
That question always gets stonewalled because it sounds like you’re checking whether they’re important enough to talk to, or plotting to go around them. Tbf that’s exactly what you are doing that but you don’t want them to feel that.
Instead frame it as a logical step in the evaluation process: