You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker

My company is in the product development outsourcing business. We write software on behalf of other companies. Often, we work with other software companies. This is a hard sell. It requires a lot of versatility from our sales staff. They have to sell a service that they individually have no use for and that they don't fully understand themselves. Sometimes, the discussion with the customer becomes very technical and they need some backup from the technical staff to convince the customer.

That is usually when they call me. They start the discussion, introduce the company and then, they call me to fill in the gap. Once all technical questions have been addressed, they get back into closing mode and make a deal. So, in my naïveté, I thought to myself... How hard can this be?

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to get my perceptions reset. I went to visit a new prospective customer solo. This was a last minute thing and we couldn't assemble a team fast enough. I had experience with those meetings and I was prepared, I had a presentation ready, sample projects to talk about, I thought that I would just walk in there and close my first deal. The meeting went well. After the meeting, the customer and I were chatting on our way out of the office and he said something to me that just shocked me:

You are a dealbreaker, not a dealmaker.

That's it I thought. I flew all the way out here just to screw it up.

Seeing that I was... perplexed by this statement, he promptly clarified: You are the kind of guy that would walk away and not look back if the deal doesn't make sense to you. You will not try and fix it and close a deal that is not that good.

I blinked, not knowing if this was a good thing or a bad thing. He picked up on that and told me that he was happy that I was a dealbreaker. He said that he wanted to deal with someone that would take ownership of their product and that would not compromise on achieving the objectives. He asked me a few questions and he asked me to work on some pricing to be discussed the next morning. Two weeks later, we're still negotiating and it looks like we're going to work together.

I realize now that I was lucky. I just happened to fall on the one customer that needed to deal with someone like me. I realize that I will have to let dealmakers make deals. And that I should just be happy with my support role. It takes a lot of skill to convince someone to spend tens of thousands of dollars with someone that they have just met. Without the dealmakers, us dealbreakers would be out of a job.