The Spaces Between the Pins

Early in my career I was selling structured cabling across Ohio for several large manufacturers and working remotely out of the spare bedroom in my 800-square-foot house in Westerville. I had spent months chasing one deal in Dayton. LexisNexis was putting in roughly three hundred thousand feet of cable, plus the fiber and connectivity to go with it.

I did the site visits. I provided a substantial amount of technical third-party testing, I had product installed for testing onsite, I spoke with Lexis’s existing installation contractor, and I even provided comprehensive pricing through them. I got to know the gentleman making the decision after a dozen visits, and he got to know me well from those meetings, lunches, and industry events. He liked me, he liked the product, and he liked the price and our availability. Once it was time for him to have it ordered and installed, he told me he was officially moving to my products. I was beyond elated that I was going to win my first large project.

And then I lost.

He had formally requested pricing from the contractor who took care of his network, which was one of the largest installers in Dayton, and they were fundamentally aligned with another brand, Avaya. They had been associated with Avaya for years, from when it was known as Lucent Technologies, and they had made it clear that they would be open to me assisting their customer and would be fair, but that their core product was Avaya.

When LexisNexis asked for the full quote with installation, it became clear that the project was going to be very substantial. I never would have guessed what happened next. The contractor took my price and carried my numbers back to their primary manufacturer. Avaya, who needed them to remain loyal and to hit their dealership growth numbers, matched my numbers, provided price protection against any other contractor, and the whole thing closed up around me. My own pricing became the tool they used to keep me out.

I had the customer’s yes, and it didn’t matter. The people the customer trusted had a stake in me losing.

I’d like to tell you I learned the lesson that day; however, I didn’t. I told myself what most of us tell ourselves: they had the relationship, I got outworked and used, and I’d just get the next one. Then it happened again, on several other projects with other contractors and other end users, and I had to be honest with myself. Something else was happening. As a lifelong competitor and a degreed biologist, I had to understand what was going on.

So I hung a map of Ohio on the wall of my spare-room office on Llewellyn Drive and put a pin in every project I’d won and every single one I’d lost, each with a slip of paper listing as many of its variables as I could find. As a scientist, I knew that if you understood the variables influencing the outcomes, you could recognize patterns to predict the outcomes on opportunities that could be won and ones that could not.

For a while I just stared at the pins, and no clear patterns emerged. Then one night I stopped looking at the pins and started looking at the spaces between them.

Who installed the job? Was it private or public? Was it union or non-union? Was there a consultant? Who did that contractor buy from in distribution? Who did they owe? Who trusted whom? Who made money where, and who was motivated by reputation, safety, or money?

It was then that the insight smacked me in the face. The wins and losses weren’t random. They were being influenced by variables, much like the ones I had studied in biological systems, and the most important ones weren’t necessarily the product, the price, or the performance. They were the relationships between the people involved, what motivated each of them, and the risks they were willing to take.

The wins (and the money) often followed those relationships and incentives. The customer might have been the one signing the purchase order, but there were other people who had to recommend the product, install it, support it, and live with the consequences if something went wrong. They had relationships to protect, businesses to run, margins to defend, and reputations at stake.

In many cases, the decision was already heavily influenced before anyone compared my product to anything. At times, the formal bidding process seemed to be as much about validating an existing preference or negotiating a better price as it was about evaluating alternatives.

The product had to be good enough to get you considered. But understanding who was trusted, what each person stood to gain or lose, and who carried the risk often told you far more about who would get the order. Trust decided who got the order.

That map changed how I sold, and later how I ran companies. I quit fighting the network and started building one.

I found four contractors who didn’t compete with each other and earned my way into every one of them. I met with each one and asked to earn the right to be their top product line, and I asked for complete honesty: if I brought them opportunities, they would work only with me and my products, win or lose.

One was Dennis Severance at Chapel Technologies, the firm that the contractor I lost LexisNexis to despised the most. I identified the contractor for Honda of America, Area Energy and Electric, and asked them the same thing, knowing that they would love to pick up even more work where they already did the electrical installation. I worked with two others in different markets with access to specific vertical markets.

My products were solid, they were tested, and they were readily available at a competitive price that they could make money on. Those things were table stakes. What they were really aligning with was that they saw a 25-year-old who could honor his word, keep their business confidential, and, most importantly, actually bring them new business. They backed me because it was good for them and I could be trusted.

Four contractors became twelve, and twelve became twenty-four. My hit rate on the projects I pursued ran over seventy percent, in a market where most reps closed somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five percent. You can’t go after everything in a market, but you can control and measure what you touch.

The entire market began to recognize the success, and while some contractors and distributors chose to fight alongside other competitive brands, others chose to align with my company and our brands. Over the next several years, we captured the largest market share in Central Ohio, and the numbers from distribution proved it.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me in that spare bedroom in Westerville before I lost so many times.

Your customer is never deciding alone. He (or she) is deciding inside a system, and the system gets a vote.

Somebody has to live with the choice long after the salesperson (or engineer) goes home. Somebody gets the call at two in the morning when it breaks, and the buyer knows that they are getting that call, as well as the team that may have installed or supported it. People rarely buy the best product. They buy from whoever they trust to be there when that call comes, or when their reputation depends on it.

Since then, I have spent twenty-five years in technology markets, but I stopped thinking of this as technology and technology decision trees a long time ago. I recognized that the ecosystem (the system) decides everything: who is trusted, what agreements are already in place, who has known whom, what products others in the same market use, what influencers say, and what key customers attest to.

I’ve watched the same thing decide who gets hired, which partnership lasts, whether an acquisition actually comes together, and whether a leadership team pulls in one direction or quietly works around the boss. Anywhere people decide, either alone or together, there’s a second system underneath the one on paper.

As I looked deeper and spoke with friends and colleagues across different industries and markets, I kept finding variations of the same underlying patterns. The people, products, and circumstances changed, but the influence of relationships, incentives, and risk kept showing up.

So, as you look for the reasons why you are winning or losing, ask yourself some different questions. What did the decision maker have to believe for a yes to feel safe? What variables were they actually looking at, and who else did they ask about you and your product? Who else has to live with the choice? Whose incentives line up with yours, and whose don’t? Who already has influence here, and what do they need?

After you ask yourself these questions, do yourself a favor: make your map. Then go stand in front of it, and look at the spaces between the pins. Look for the patterns, understand the idiosyncrasies. If you’ve lived your own version of this, I’d like to hear it. I read every reply.

Welcome to the start of The System Beneath the System.