Account Check
Do you know the account, or just your contact?
Answer five questions and find out where you're single-threaded.
5 taps · about a minute · nothing stored
Mission · Money · Power · Incumbent · Path
Answer five questions and find out where you're single-threaded.
5 taps · about a minute · nothing stored
Mission · Money · Power · Incumbent · Path
Deal Check asks whether one opportunity is real. This asks whether you know the account it lives in. The difference shows up the day your contact leaves, gets reorganized, or stops answering.
MISSION: What are they trying to get done? Not what you sell them. What the agency, the program or the business unit has to accomplish this year, in words they'd recognize. If you can only describe the account in terms of your product, you know the opportunity, not the account.
MONEY: Where does it come from, beyond your deal? Appropriations, program lines, colors of money, fiscal calendars, the budget office. A seller who knows the account's money knows about deals before they exist. A seller who only knows the money for their own deal finds out about the others from the competitor's press release.
POWER: Who matters beyond this deal? Single-threaded is the most common way a good account goes quiet. If every conversation runs through one person, you don't have a relationship with the account; you have a relationship with them, and they have a career.
INCUMBENT: Who already owns it? Relationships, contracts and workloads all have owners, and most of them aren't you. Knowing who they are, and what they'd lose, is the difference between competing and hoping.
PATH: How do they actually buy? The contracting office, the vehicles they use, the approvals, the people who run the process. Every account has a way it buys, and it's the same for your deal as for the next one. Learn it once.
Mapped. You know the mission, the money, the people and the process. Now find the next deal before anyone else does.
Half mapped. You know the parts your deal touches. Fill in the rest before the deal makes you.
One thread. Everything runs through one person. That's a risk, not a relationship. Get introduced upward and sideways this month.
A contact. You know someone there. That's the beginning of an account, not an account.
I carried a number, managed the people who did, and led partner sales teams at AWS. I make these because they're the things I wish we'd had. If a check isn't enough, I'm happy to look at the real thing with you.