Your best people win the hard deals.
The complex ones. The ones that stall for everyone else. The ones that somehow close when the right person is on them.
That feels like strength. It is worth looking at more closely, because it may be the opposite.
A buyer commits when they are confident enough – that the problem is understood, that the trade-offs are acceptable, that the decision will still make sense when a colleague questions it in six months. That confidence is what your commercial work is actually for.
Not persuasion. Confidence, built to the point where someone will put their name to a decision.
And confidence does not come from one conversation. It builds, or leaks, across every touch the buyer has with you.
The first conversation. The proposal. The security review. The pricing back-and-forth. The handoff to delivery.
Each interface either adds to their confidence or quietly drains it. The buyer experiences the whole chain, not the individual links.
Which means confidence is a property of the system, not a talent of the individual. When the chain is coherent, confidence accumulates on its own, and ordinary people close hard deals. When the chain is fragmented – when the message shifts between functions, when handoffs drop context, when each interface optimises for itself – confidence leaks at every seam.
Then someone steps in and compensates. Your strongest people are often doing exactly that: holding together, by force of individual skill, a confidence the system keeps losing at the joins. Carrying the context the handoff dropped. Re-explaining what the last interface muddied. Being, personally, the coherence the system does not provide.
It works. So it reads as excellence, and gets rewarded as excellence. But look at what it actually tells you: the deal closed because of who was on it, not because of how the system works.
Move that person, and the deal does not close.
That is not strength. It is the system’s incoherence, hidden by a person absorbing its cost. Performance that depends on the right individual is not resilient.
It is brittle, wearing the mask of your best quarter.
The work is not to find more heroes. It is to build a chain coherent enough that confidence accumulates without one – so that closing the hard deal stops being a thing your best people do, and becomes a thing your system does.
Does your commercial system make it easier for buyers to gain confidence over time – or does it rely on individuals to compensate for incoherence?
This question closes a chapter of The Architecture of Commercial Performance, where the thinking behind it is developed in full.
