I don’t think most deals are lost during discovery
They’re lost afterwards.
The meeting ends.
Everyone says it was a good conversation.
A day later a follow-up lands in the buyer’s inbox.
It has some notes, proposal and couple of links.
And now the buyer has work to do.
They’ve got to explain the problem to people who weren’t even in the meeting.
Remember what actually mattered.
Work out whether everyone’s talking about the same thing.
By the time that happens...
The momentum’s gone.
I think that’s where a lot of good deals disappear.
It isn’t because the proposal was bad.
It’s because nobody helped the buyer carry the conversation forward.
That was the part I hadn’t really appreciated until recently.
It ended up being a much bigger discussion than I expected.
We got into why we never just send meeting notes anymore.
Why buyers are far more likely to engage with something they can challenge than something they can only read.
And why we’ve started treating the discovery brief as a checkpoint before a proposal ever goes out.
There was one story in there that stuck with me.
A rep changed nothing about the way they ran discovery.
The only thing they changed was what happened afterwards.
That one change ended up lifting their proposal-to-close win rate to around 80%.
If you’ve ever had a deal disappear after what felt like a great first meeting, I think you’ll learn a lot from this one
-David
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