Account Executive

Stop working the wrong deals and resting the right ones on one person.

It qualifies hard enough to walk away. Four things have to be true: the customer can name the problem, something bad happens if they do nothing, there is a route to whoever signs, and the money exists. Missing one is a question to ask. Missing three is a deal that gets closed out today instead of politely emailed for three months.

It gets a second name on the deal. A deal with one contact dies the day that person changes job or loses an argument you were not in. Every Tuesday it finds the deals resting on one person and writes the introduction the champion can forward, framed in terms the second person actually cares about. It never goes around a champion, because that loses the champion and the deal.

It keeps a plan with dates on it. Built backwards from the date the customer wants the outcome, with owners on both sides, sent to the customer so both sides are working from the same page. When a step slips it asks what happened the same day, not a fortnight later, and when the same step slips three times it says plainly that the deal has moved backwards.

Every morning it writes the brief for the day's customer conversations: where the deal stands, what was agreed last time, what is unanswered, who is new in the room, and the one thing this meeting has to produce.

And when you win, it writes down what you promised. Not the contract — the things said out loud on calls that never made it into writing, the objection that was parked, the person who was never really won over, the dates the customer now believes. That ledger goes to whoever takes the account. It is the difference between a good first month and a customer who feels sold to.