One discovery call for six stakeholders is why deals stall. The CFO wants ROI, the end user wants ease of use, and somebody leaves feeling unheard.
James Buckley sat down with Mor Assouline, founder of Demo to Close, and Richard Smith, head of growth at MySalesCoach. Richard is working a five thousand pound deal with six people involved, whose combined time already costs more than the deal is worth. That is the shape of buying now, and not only in enterprise.
Multithreading starts before the first call, not after
Richard's argument is that sellers are too passive, waiting for the prospect to volunteer names. Instead, look at your recent deals, work out which roles get pulled in, and name those roles in your first meeting. Prospects often do not know who they should involve. Mor works the pattern side: if VP of Sales deals reliably loop in a CRO and a head of enablement, find those people on LinkedIn beforehand.
The stakeholder you ignore is the one who stalls the deal
Richard had a deal with the VP of Sales, the CEO, and two sales managers all bought in on quota attainment and pipeline. They added their HR lead to a call and he assumed senior buy-in was enough. Momentum died. His champion later told him she felt unheard: she cared about staff retention and career development, not revenue. The budget was also hers. He got back on a call, admitted he had got it wrong, and saved it.
The VAC framework
Mor's model for whether a deal will close. Visibility, do you know who the stakeholders are and when they enter. Awareness, do they know about the problem, the initiative, and the conversation. Consensus, do they agree it is a problem, worth solving, worth solving now, and a priority against everything else. His question for testing that last part: this is probably not the only thing on your plate, so what else could delay it?
Ask for one-on-ones before the group call
Richard's least intuitive advice, and he says it works about seventy percent of the time. When a champion offers to put five people on a call, slow down and ask to speak with each of them first, framed as protecting their colleagues from a call where they feel unheard. Then build a slide naming what each person cares about.
The blind spot most sellers never sell against
Mor calls it the FUD matrix. Most sellers only sell against the problem list and never address fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He builds one per buying scenario, because someone moving off twenty years of spreadsheets worries about migrating the data, while someone switching vendors worries about feature parity and price. Richard's version: what stops deals is rarely a preference for the status quo, it is the fear of being the person who picked wrong.
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