Where am I in this deal, really?

Where are you in this deal?

Think about a major deal you've got open right now. One that matters. One you're hoping comes in. Where are you in that deal? Are you still prospecting? Is the client genuinely engaged, or just being polite? Do you know why they need you – not just the job they've asked for, but the reason underneath it? Or has someone just asked you for a price, and you're about to send one, and if you're honest you couldn't say much more about them than that?

Many owners can't locate themselves in their own deals, and it's not because they're careless. It's because you were never really sure where you stood when you sent it. So this is about being able to place yourself in any deal, at any moment, with your eyes open.

The five stages

When a deal is big enough and complex enough to matter, there are five general stages a well-formed deal moves through, and they go in a particular order: prospecting, qualification, discovery, scope and alignment, and then, last, proposal. None of this is new. It's the same methodology large enterprise sales teams have run for years – all acronyms and stages and huge amounts of machinery. But underneath the jargon there's something simple and worth understanding, and we've summarized it down to five stages you can hold in your head the next time a major deal is in front of you.

The whole thing turns on one idea. Each stage earns you the right to move to the next one, and proposal is last for a reason. If you propose before you've discovered and before you've aligned, you're moving blind. You're guessing. But the thing is, you don't feel that you're guessing – because someone asked for a price, and providing one felt like progress.

A real deal, stage by stage

So let me walk you through a real example. A few years ago I was referred to the owner of a multi-million dollar business, well established and still growing. The referral was warm – but it was warm because the need was known, the surface need. The person introducing us knew the owner had something worth solving. Now, he wasn't warm on us. He didn't know us. He had a real problem and a healthy skepticism about whether we were going to be the right people to help him solve it. And that's a good, honest starting position for most deals. So we're in stage one together: prospecting.

We move into stage two, qualification. This is where a little research goes a long way – understanding the shape of the business, how long it's been going, whether it was growing or sliding backwards, what its reputation and trajectory looked like. And this business qualified well. He was the kind of client we like to work with.

But here's the trap. That's usually the point where people start selling. The business checks out, the owner's engaged, so let's get to a proposal. And if we'd done that, we'd have sold him on a growth engagement, because that's what the numbers looked like they needed. It would have been the wrong deal entirely, and we'd never have connected with the owner at all.

So our first real meeting was about discovery. The real picture had nothing to do with growth. It was that the owner was working too hard – married to the business, over-laboring – and coming to a realization that he was at a stage of life where he wanted a different outcome for himself and his family. One where he wasn't the center of everything. And that conversation made something explicit that had been sitting in the back of his mind: if nothing changed, he'd stay trapped. His quality of life would degrade. The path wasn't sustainable, and the burnout he could see coming would take his financial future down with it. Him naming it out loud was the moment it became real – not a worry anymore, but a problem to solve. And none of that's written on a balance sheet. You only reach it by speaking with the client and understanding where they really are. Qualification would have found a healthy business. Discovery found the owner inside of it.

And though none of that was pitching – we weren't telling him what we'd sell him – we were understanding who he was, how he made decisions, and what the real problem looked like. Only then could we move into scope and alignment, which is where the work actually starts to get agreed. We spoke about the alternatives, how they'd feel, what would genuinely have to happen for anything to change – not just the work we'd do, but the work he'd have to do. And part of that was being honest about what wouldn't get him there. Self-learning and traditional coaching weren't going to move this one. And that was his conclusion at the end, in his words – not a line we sold him.

So by the time we reached the proposal stage, we'd already agreed on what a great outcome would look like, and what the path would be. The proposal itself just confirmed what it would cost, whatever it would take, how we'd measure success, who would decide, and when. All of that was settled before anything went in writing. Which meant the proposal wasn't a pitch. It wasn't a moment of tension where all the work we'd done together might be wasted. It was a moment of confirmation. And that's what a proposal is supposed to be.

What to do at your next opportunity

And here's the point: if you move through these stages, it's far less costly to reach a place where you can both see it isn't going to work and opt out early, as friends, than to force a price out there through blindness and hope and pray that it lands.

So here's what I'd do at the next opportunity. Take every major deal you have on the table right now and locate yourself, honestly, in one of the five stages. Am I still prospecting? Have I qualified that this is the right client for us, and us for them? Have I actually done discovery – do I know what they need to act, not just what they've asked me to quote? Have I reached alignment before I put a price forward? And have I earned the proposal, or did I jump into it?

Where you find that you've priced but you've still got major questions open, one of two things can happen. You can go back, ask the questions you skipped, reopen the conversation, and maybe repropose from a real footing. Or you can simply see that you're not where you thought you were, and the deal isn't as real as it looks. And that doesn't mean it's dead. It just means you can decide, with open eyes, whether to change its trajectory or let it sit – instead of counting on it and being surprised if and when it goes quiet.

None of this is about closing harder. It's the opposite. It's about knowing exactly where you stand, so you stop pouring your best hours into deals that were never real.

This is one area of selling

Now, this is only one area of selling. We've built a scorecard that maps what your whole sales motion looks like as the owner of a relationship-driven business – where you're strong, and where the gaps may be. It's free, it takes a couple of minutes, and you can score yourself very quickly by gut feel. We don't save anything or record any details, but you might find it very worthwhile to give it a go.