One to one coaching for sellers running big deals
Nobody said no.
Nobody said yes.
That is where your year went. Between forty and sixty percent of deals are lost to customers who said they intended to buy and then did nothing. I coach the people running those deals, one to one, on the live ones.
Harvard Business Review, June 2022, more than 2.5 million recorded sales conversations
Thirty minutes on one deal that has stopped. No charge.
How much commission is stuck in your stalled deals? Work it out.
The films
Short films on why deals stall.
The argument
You were never in the room where it stopped.
74%
of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the decision.
Early in my career at Ford I had a managing director who wanted to change his entire fleet. Priced, specified, agreed. It never moved. I had been taught to sell to the man who signs the cheque, so that is exactly what I did. His service team, his finance people and his management all had their own reasons to stay where they were, and he was never going to make his own staff unhappy to please me.
Nobody beat me on that deal. I lost it on my own.
Twenty years later, on a one point nine million pound job through Técnicas Reunidas, exactly the same thing was happening. Technical signed off, documentation agreed, terms sat there going nowhere. The difference was that by then I knew whose room the decision was actually in. So I stopped guessing at it through the contractor and went and got it from the owner.
It took me thirty years to learn that. You do not have to take thirty years.
What you get sold, and what actually happens
Most sales training was written for somebody else's sale.
Find the one pain and press on it.
Several problems at once, most of them owned by the business rather than the person sat in front of you.
Get specified or you have lost.
Being specified is the biggest lever on a project and it tilts the odds hard. It is not pass or fail. You can still win the work from outside it.
Work the contractor, they place the order.
Work both angles. On Marjan I put a call in with Aramco and took the dates from the owner. Nobody else did.
Your champion will carry it internally.
Your champion is losing an argument in a room you are not in, because nobody armed them for it.
Technical sign off means you have won it.
Technical get you into the build. Quality decide whether you stay in it. Procurement decide whether you get paid.
A method built for software, resold to industry.
A method built on marine, rail, defence, oil and gas, construction, energy and instrumentation. It travels.
74%
of B2B buyer teams demonstrate unhealthy conflict during the decision
5 to 16
people in a buying group, across as many as four functions
53%
of business buying cycles have procurement as a decision maker
The method
Skill, position and experience beat raw power.
Ringcraft is the boxing word for exactly that. It is also what wins a deal with several people in the decision.
- 01
Deal control
The big one. Who is actually driving this deal, you or them. Control it properly and indecision never gets a hold, because a deal you are running does not sit there for a year going nowhere. Everything else on this list feeds it.
GG&G cycle, 18 to 24 months down to 12
- 02
Outside the spec
The one nobody teaches. You are not in the specification and the job may still be winnable. Where the way in actually is, how approval carries you, and how to tell in a fortnight whether it is worth your year.
Being specified helps. It is not the whole job
- 03
Both angles
Contractor and end user at the same time. On Marjan I called Aramco and mapped the dates from the owner. Everyone else was working the EPC and guessing.
Timing from the owner, not the EPC
- 04
The decision map
Not an org chart. A map of who decides, who objects and why. Technical get you into the build, quality decide whether you stay in it, procurement decide whether you get paid, and all three need mapping.
Three gates, one deal
- 05
Channel without blindness
Appoint, activate, remove. How to sell through a partner without losing sight of the end user who actually decides.
Direct and partner in parallel
- 06
Qualification
And the nerve to disqualify. Chasing everything is why your year is thin and your forecast is fiction.
14 of 16 closed in two months
- 07
Managing upward
Why your manager is on your back and how to end it. Give them a forecast they can defend and the pressure stops. Deal control is what makes that possible.
A forecast you can defend
Range
Two weeks of formal sales training. In thirty years.
Safestyle taught me to close. Doors, commission only, no salary. Ford put me through the only structured B2B programme I have ever sat in. That is all of it.
Everything since I worked out myself on live deals, across fifteen industries. It has had to work in marine, rail, defence, oil and gas, construction, energy management, instrumentation, pumping systems and safety equipment. It travels because it had no choice.
- 30
- years selling
- 15
- industries
- 50+
- countries
- £100M+
- delivered
Some of the contracts
- Marjan Gas, Saudi Aramco£1.9M
- PKN Orlen, Poland€1.2M
- Saab Naval, Sweden$650K
- Defence contractor, Norway£500K
- Amazon EMEA, Italy£400K
- QinetiQ Defence, UK£350K
- Samsung Engineering, Qatar£280K
- Bechtel, Chile$250K
- Fluor, Greece£250K
- Woodside, Australia£150K
My own deals, not coaching results. Those go here when the first members have them.
The programme
$500
a month, everything in
Founding rate for the first cohort, held against a documented before and after. Close rate, cycle length and average deal size, agreed in session one and measured at the end.
- Two one hour sessions every month.One to one, on your live deals. Not case studies, not scenarios, not somebody else's business.
- A direct channel for new deals.Something lands on your desk, you ask, you get a straight answer. Working days, 8am until 8pm Dubai time.
- Weekly group call, once numbers allow.One real deal pulled apart in front of the group. Attendance is optional and nobody is made to present.
- Full access to Froob.io.The project sales CRM I built. Your whole pipeline, run around the deal rather than the contact.
- Full access to Parteloa.The market and channel intelligence platform behind it.
- I see your live pipeline.When we sit down I am already inside the deals that matter. You do not spend the first twenty minutes catching me up.
Straight answers
The questions everybody asks.
What actually happens in a session?
You bring a live deal. Not a hypothetical, not one that closed last year. We pull it apart, work out where the decision actually sits and who is arguing against you, and you leave with the next three things to do and who to do them to. If you have nothing live, we work on your pipeline instead and find out why it is thin.
I do not sell machines. Does this still work?
Yes. I started on the doors selling windows and kitchens, then contract hire at Ford, then energy management, then pumps, then safety equipment. Thirty day sales and three year ones. What matters is not the length of your cycle or what is in the box, it is whether more than one person has a say in the answer. If they do, this works.
Are you going to teach me a framework?
No. Everything I teach came out of deals I either won or lost, and most of the useful bits came from the losses. If you want a certificate and a model with an acronym, there are people who will sell you that.
What is Froob.io, and do I have to use it?
It is the project sales CRM I built for running my own deals. Stakeholder mapping, deal scoring and velocity, built for deals with more than one person in them rather than for contacts. You do not have to use it, but the people who do get more out of the sessions, because I walk in already knowing where your deals are.
Can I cancel?
Any time, and it stops at the end of the month you have paid for. No notice period, no minimum term, no exit conversation. If it is not working you should leave.
My employer might pay. Can you invoice them?
Yes. Email me at scott@ventired.com and say so, and I will raise a proper invoice against the company.
Is what I tell you confidential?
Completely. Nothing you bring to a session leaves it, and I will sign your NDA if you want one on paper. I also will not coach two people competing for the same contract. If that comes up I will tell you and step back from one of them.
