Bring a stalled deal

Insights / Buying groups

We pushed into Caterpillar's engine build. They asked for an open book review.

Technical gets you into the build. Quality decides whether you stay in it. Procurement decides whether you get paid. What that looked like at Caterpillar, GE and Saab, and how I run the gates side by side.

Scott Robinson, 13 November 2026, 4 min read

I pushed to get into Caterpillar's engine build programme, and they asked for an open book review of our supply chain.

That is how you find out how many gates there are.

Technical gets you into the engine build. Quality decides whether you stay in it. Procurement decides whether you get paid. Win the first and lose either of the other two and you have worked eighteen months for nothing.

What the gates look like on a real deal

I was at GG&G, Gilbert Gilkes & Gordon in Kendal, selling engine cooling pumps. Over the time I was there the business went from £2.5M to £15.2M, and the cycle came down from 18 to 24 months to around 12.

We started with Caterpillar's technical people, on marine engines. That was the easy part to enjoy. An engineer wants to talk about the product. You want to talk about the product. You can go home thinking it is going well.

Then the open book request landed. I pushed back. Eventually I yielded, but I presented it in a format that suited us. And behind that sat quality gateway after quality gateway, which was normal across most of our customers.

GE was the other side of the same coin. They sold few marine engines a year, big and low volume, so we wanted to charge for the design work. Around £150,000. I closed it. It was the first time in Gilkes' very long history that they had charged for pump design work. That was a commercial conversation, and technical could not have had it for me.

Procurement is not waiting at the end

Forrester's 2026 report on business buying says procurement professionals are decision makers in 53% of buying cycles and engage from the start of the process. That comes from a press release that does not state the sample or break it down by industry, so treat it as a direction rather than a measurement.

The same release puts the typical decision at 13 internal stakeholders and nine external influencers. Delainey Kirkwood of Gartner, in a May 2025 release, says five to 16 people across as many as four functions. Forrester lists outside influencers separately and that Gartner release does not say whether its figure includes them, so there is no single right number. The point is that it is a lot more people than the engineer you were talking to.

Do not wait for the next gate

On Saab's naval programme in Sweden, a $650K multi stage tender, technical qualification and commercial negotiation ran at the same time. I ran them in parallel and stayed in front of the procurement decision makers at every stage rather than waiting for the next gate.

Sequence is how sellers lose eighteen months. Run the gates side by side.

Treat them as three separate sales inside one deal. That is what the decision map is for. Put a name against each gate this week, and ask each one a different question.

Technical. What do you need to see before you will put your name to it? Get the list in writing and agree it is the whole list.

Quality. What would make you take us out? Ask it while things are going well, and put your own quality person in front of theirs.

Procurement. What do you need in order to justify this? Not the discount. The justification. Then give it to them in their terms: total cost, risk and what a delay costs.

If you can only name the person at one of those gates, you know where to spend next week.

The short version

Win all three gates or you have not won. Start all three early, and never let the engineer be your only friend in the building.

Got one that has stopped at a gate? Bring a stalled deal. Thirty minutes on one deal, no charge, and you leave knowing where it has actually stopped and the three things to do next.

Sources

Keep reading

Deal controlHe said yes. He signs the cheques. It still never happened.A managing director agreed to change his entire fleet and nobody beat me to it. Twenty years later a £1.9M Aramco package started going the same way. What I did differently, and what I do on any deal that goes quiet.