Total Click Solutions

Tag: pipeline management

  • Stop Relying on One Champion to Close the Deal

    Stop Relying on One Champion to Close the Deal

    The champion is not enough. They might be enthusiastic, politically savvy, and completely sold on what you’re offering, and the deal can still go cold the moment someone from finance asks a question they can’t answer. Every experienced seller has felt this, usually right before a deal slips into next quarter.

    Buying committees have been growing for years and haven’t stopped. Forrester’s 2024 research puts the median at eleven or more stakeholders, up from eight in 2018, and InfoSec, data-privacy, and vendor-risk reviews now routinely add weeks to enterprise deals even at mid-market accounts. The person who invited you into the process almost certainly doesn’t control all of those conversations.

    The logical instinct when you get a warm intro is to nurture that one relationship carefully before expanding. Establish trust first, then broaden out. It sounds sensible, and it’s exactly how deals stall, because while you’re spending six weeks deepening one relationship, the rest of the buying committee is forming opinions about your product from your website, your competitors’ outreach, and whatever your champion happens to mention in passing.

    Why single-threaded deals collapse

    The failure mode is predictable. Your champion goes quiet because they’re busy, pulled onto something else, or managing internal politics you can’t see, and suddenly there’s no momentum. Or they leave the company entirely, which, given how frequently people change jobs, is hardly an edge case. A multi-threaded deal survives that because several other people already understand the value you’re offering. A single-threaded one doesn’t.

    There’s also a subtler problem: the business case your champion builds will naturally cover their area of pain. Finance, IT, legal, and operations all have different concerns, and none of them are going to rubber-stamp a recommendation that doesn’t address theirs. The enemy usually isn’t a rival vendor. It’s internal friction you were never part of resolving.

    What multi-threading actually means in practice

    Multi-threading means building active relationships across the buying committee rather than relying on one person to carry the deal internally. The goal isn’t to flood an account with messages, which irritates everyone, but to make sure each relevant stakeholder hears something tailored to their specific concern, ideally before the formal evaluation stage, when opinions are still forming.

    Sequencing matters. Build a genuine champion first, then use that relationship to map the rest of the committee and get introductions rather than going around your contact cold. By the third or fourth touchpoint you should have names and roles for the economic buyer, the technical evaluator, and whoever is going to run procurement. These are not the same person, and they almost never want the same thing from a conversation with you.

    A practical way to think about it: your champion needs confidence to sell internally; your economic buyer needs a number that justifies the spend; your technical contact needs to know it won’t create new problems; procurement needs to know you’re not a compliance headache. A business case built across five stakeholders quantifies the cost of inaction in multiple functions, which is a considerably more compelling document than one person’s departmental pain.

    The CRM problem nobody talks about

    Despite all the evidence that multi-threaded deals close at materially higher rates, roughly 70% of B2B opportunities still have only one point of contact logged in the CRM. That’s not a coincidence. Single-threading is the path of least resistance: one relationship to manage, one inbox to track, one person to update. Expanding the contact map takes deliberate effort and a willingness to ask your champion to make introductions, which feels uncomfortable when the deal is still fragile.

    But the discomfort of asking for those introductions is considerably less than the discomfort of explaining in Q4 why a deal you had forecast as certain has gone dark because your contact moved to a different company.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    When should I start multi-threading, after the first meeting or later?

    As early as the second or third touchpoint, once you have a genuine champion. The common mistake is waiting until the deal feels advanced, by which point the rest of the committee has already formed views without your input. Use your champion to make warm introductions rather than reaching out cold.

    What if my champion doesn’t want me talking to other stakeholders?

    That’s worth paying attention to. A champion who actively blocks broader access is often signalling that the deal doesn’t have the internal support they’ve implied. It’s not always a red flag, but it’s worth a direct conversation about why, framed around making it easier for them to build the internal case.

  • BANT vs MEDDIC: Which One Actually Fits Your Deal?

    BANT vs MEDDIC: Which One Actually Fits Your Deal?

    What each framework actually does

    BANT and MEDDIC are not two ways of doing the same thing. They operate at different stages of a deal and answer different questions entirely, so treating them as interchangeable options in the same debate is a reliable way to pick the wrong one.

    BANT, which IBM developed in the 1950s and which has shown a rather stubborn refusal to go away, covers four things: Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline. It’s a quick triage filter. The question it’s really answering is whether a lead is worth your time at all, and you can usually work that out in a single discovery call. It was never designed to close complex deals, just to stop you chasing ones that had no realistic chance from the start.

    MEDDIC goes considerably further. It stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion, and where BANT gives you a yes/no on whether to proceed, MEDDIC maps the entire buying landscape: who controls the budget, how the decision actually gets made, who inside the organisation is championing you, and what measurable outcome the prospect is trying to achieve. It’s less a checklist than a working model of the deal.

    The honest case for BANT

    BANT gets a lot of criticism from people who’ve tried to use it on enterprise deals it was never meant for, which is a bit like complaining that a penknife doesn’t fell trees. For high-volume inbound pipelines, shorter sales cycles, and transactional B2B deals where one person can say yes, it’s still genuinely useful. It’s also easy to teach, and that matters more than it sounds: a framework your whole team applies consistently beats a sophisticated one that only your best reps actually use.

    The limitation is real, though. BANT assumes a single decision-maker with clear authority, and that assumption breaks down almost immediately in any deal involving procurement, a buying committee, or a contract worth talking about. If you’re working a six-month enterprise cycle and asking only four questions, you don’t have a qualification process. You have a polite conversation.

    When MEDDIC earns its complexity

    The extra weight of MEDDIC pays for itself by surfacing the things that kill large deals late, which is always the worst time for them to die. A champion who turned out to have no real influence when the contract reached procurement. An economic buyer nobody had actually spoken to. Decision criteria that shifted halfway through because a new stakeholder joined the committee. MEDDIC forces you to confront these gaps early, when you can still do something about them.

    Teams that use it rigorously also tend to produce more honest forecasts, because “70% confident” stops meaning “I have a good feeling about this one” and starts meaning something concrete: the pain is articulated, the economic buyer is identified, the champion is genuinely engaged. That’s a different kind of certainty.

    Which one to use

    Most teams don’t actually need to choose one and abandon the other. The sensible approach is staged: use BANT early as a lightweight filter to decide whether a lead clears the basic bar, then shift to MEDDIC as the deal grows in size, complexity, and the number of people who have to say yes before anything gets signed. Your qualification standard should rise in proportion to what the deal is going to cost you to pursue.

    If your deals are mostly under £30,000 with one or two stakeholders and a short cycle, BANT is probably sufficient and MEDDIC would be overkill that slows you down without adding much. If you’re selling enterprise software with nine-month cycles and a procurement team in the mix, BANT alone will leave you with a pipeline full of deals that feel promising right up until they don’t.

    And whichever framework you use, the one thing to avoid is picking it because it sounds more impressive, then quietly abandoning it when the questions get uncomfortable. A qualification framework only works if you’re actually willing to disqualify people with it.