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READ TIME: 8 MINUTES | 12 AUGUST, 2026 | READ ON PHILHSC.COM​

Have I pushed too hard?

That thought arrived the moment the Senior Vice President of diagnostics told me my urgency was making him uncomfortable. I was negotiating access to his platform for Drop Bio Health, and he was used to enterprise customers who moved at his pace and danced his corporate dance.

Without that platform we didn’t have a business. In biotech, platforms are the tools, techniques, and reagent chemicals developed and owned by iconic multinational companies that sell or license their use to those doing pioneering work.

We were ten people moving fast in the middle of COVID.

To him we were a small deal in a large pipeline. Someone in his position would ordinarily call us negligible at best, or at worst, a waste of time.

At the time, it was the only deal that mattered to me.

The asymmetry in sales

That asymmetry sits in a predictable place in every sales or business development pipeline. It lives in the gap between qualification and close.

Qualification is the point where a customer has told you they want to work with you and the scope and budget are clear enough that you would put the deal in front of your own company and add it to a revenue forecast.

Close is a signed contract from which work can begin.

When qualified, you have told your organisation the deal has a good chance of closing, and people have started making plans around it. In a small company one deal can change the trajectory of the business, so a ‘no’ is not a private no. It arrives in front of everyone who heard you forecast it.

While delivering value is the ultimate sign of a successful deal or partnership, everything hard about selling lives in the space between qualification and close.

And that’s why these two questions live as a permanent fixture in the minds of those who sell:

What if I can’t push this customer to move faster?

What if I push and they walk?

I have been in that position at every other company I founded, and anyone who has run business development or been a CEO knows that feeling well.

In Ryan Hawk’s book The Price of Becoming (highly recommended) he recalls how Ken Griffin, founder and CEO of Citadel, tells a story about a plaque. His physics teacher, who later became his business partner in Chicago, kept a plaque behind his desk. It read: “If we’re all going to eat, someone has to sell.” Ken saw this early in his career, and he described it since as the moment his thinking about building a business changed.

You sell each day

Sales is not a team or a function. It’s fundamental to our lives.

A doctor spends a career selling lifestyle changes to patients who have every reason to accept and mostly do not. The rejection rate in that work is punishing and the stakes could not be higher. Nobody would describe it as sales.

The rest of us are in the same trade with lower stakes. Every leader is selling understanding and perspective. Every parent is selling better nutrition, more sleep, and less screen time to help create a well-rounded human. Every founder is selling a version of the future to people who have to fund it, build it, or buy it. If you are doing any of that, you are being told no many more times than yes.

You can treat each no as a verdict, or you can treat it as the required rep that builds the muscle to make better asks and deliver more value.

The deal with the diagnostics platform closed.

And what I have learned since, across seven companies now, is that there are three ways to move a deal from qualification to close that hold, and often improve, the profitability of the deal.

None of them involve pushing.

Before I share this, you need to be very clear about the inconvenient truth in sales. The people you are selling to grow more tired and distracted every day. And they have built language and behaviours to convince you that you have their undivided attention when you present to them.

Whatever residual message they take from the meeting is then mixed into an organisation of the same people. Well-intentioned but increasingly tired and distracted.

After that first, second, or third meeting and a volley of polite follow-ups, many sales teams find themselves somewhere in qualification purgatory.

You can have the greatest product, the slickest marketing material, and the best sales professionals in the world and you still won’t close.

There are three E’s

Here’s how I’ve been able to close when faced with that challenge, and I share this with CEOs who need their go-to-market teams to think differently.

I call it the Triple E rule.

1. Educate: Bring the wider customer team in and teach them what the product does by making it a memorable experience. The people who sign the contract are rarely the people who sat in your meetings, and the ones who kill deals late in the process are usually the ones who never understood the product well enough to defend it. Informal (or formal) accreditation works here, because it turns a curious observer into someone with a new career-advancing skillset. I have seen instances where that ‘accreditation’ became the industry standard for employment.
2. Exhibit: Offer to co-pitch alongside your champion’s decision makers. This answers the technical questions in the room where they are being asked rather than through a chain of forwarded emails, and it signals commitment at the moment your customer is deciding whether you will still be there in a year.
3. Extend: Sell beyond the first product they came for by building part of the next version or an adjacent service into the current deal. Extending grows the deal size rather than only moving it, because lifetime value starts accruing at signature instead of at renewal. It also gives your customer a reason to sign that comes from what they gain today and into the future, rather than from what you need this quarter.

I’ve found that educating, exhibiting, or extending changes the ask, and it relieves the pressure on you because you are demonstrating a (low-cost) commitment to their future success rather than asking the same follow-up question louder.

I also like to remember that a deal sitting at qualification is not neutral. It occupies your forecast, your team’s attention, and the part of your week that should be spent finding the next opportunity.

This is one way I have accelerated momentum in a go-to-market funnel, and now it’s yours and I hope it helps.

What’s your next move for the deal in your pipeline that has been sitting at qualification the longest?

That’s all for this week. Share this with someone who it could help.

See you next Wednesday.

Phil Hayes-St Clair
CEO Coach

PS If this essay helped, Episode 225: The one metric that predicts revenue better than pipeline from my podcast is worth a listen. Tune in on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.