So one of the deals I am currently working on is stalled pretty bad.
Backstory; mid-market to enterprise prospect, cold outbound.
Myself and another rep were working on different leads, but turns out due to a complicated business structure they both roll up into one organisation. One of my outreach attempts saw a response from a person in their accounts team (my product generally targets the finance department) reply and we organised an initial meeting. Discovery went pretty smoothly. I managed to align our Customer Service and Account Management teams on creating a custom solution for a specific need the prospect had that is manual as heck, but do-able. Shoot I even got a commercial offer to boot. My champion is pretty responsive, and I think everything's on track.
This is where it starts getting slippery. My champion has told me he is suffering from long covid, and as a result, is sometimes not working for a few days at a time, I believe this as he keeps up the responses. But things start to slow down. Push out a week here, a couple days there. I have a frank conversation with and and ask, is there someone else in his business who could help run point on this when he isn't feeling too well, no for this particular category, all roads lead back to him.
We finally get to the stage in onboarding where he needs to apply for a line of credit, doesn't want to do our automated way as he won't provide a directors name for the credit check, (pretty standard, most people think this is a directors guarantee, it isn't, but its a common objection) so we need to go down a paper route. Get the application back, he's written 20k per month credit where it should be 200k, I think to myself, you know what this isn't right, but maybe our finance team will let him change it.
Send it to the finance team letting them know its actually $200k, no deal, $200k per month is a large risk, so we need a new one. Ok, back to my guy, let him know, says ok, SENDS THE SAME APPLICATION BACK with $20k crossed out and $200k written above it. By now I should have known, but I sent to finance anyway. No surprise, again, no deal. In my most concerned and supportive way, I ask my champion again, is there someone who can help you out when you aren't doing well? No deal.
Frustration setting in, I talk to my manager, who in turn speaks to our finance team. Finance agree, if we can get an agreement signed by their CFO then we should be good to go.
Champion does NOT want to do this. Seems to not want to bother the CFO about anything at all. I get him to agree to at least send it across to the CFO, and the docusign is just sitting there, not even read.
Have followed up with him a few times and am always told, its sitting with the CFO there is nothing he can do.
So my question, how do you go around your champion without burning him?
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