Almost every B2B business is confronted by the “live by the large deals and die by the large deals” issue. This is not unexpected as the 80/20 rule applies to most human endeavors. In this case, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of customers (or some imbalance resembling that). If we don’t get the top 20% of our customers right, it is virtually impossible to hit our numbers by trying to make it all up on the relatively small deals of the remaining 80%.

In this blog I want explore the challenges that customers have to deciding to award a big deal to you. Obviously, large deals are lost for a variety of reasons such as key decision makers leaving the company or changing jobs, changes to the business such as acquisitions that put everything on “hold”, or poor quarterly results that freeze budgets and projects. All of these are out or our control—and that’s why every sales organization needs a sales pipeline that is some multiple of quota because there are things out of our control.